Easy as Pie

"You can't be right," she said. They were sitting at their kitchen table, the remnants of their meatloaf dinner already wrapped in tin foil. His gray hair was lit by the sun's rays streaming through the window. She sliced off another piece of peach pie and held it out to him, but he shook his head no.

"Do the math," he said. "You're as good a physicist as me."

She speared a huge peach chunk with her fork and plopped it in her mouth, slightly muffling her voice. "So it's really the end of the world?" she asked.

He nodded. "Uh-huh. We've got five days, four hours--" He peered up at the ceramic clock hanging on the wall--"and thirty-two minutes. Then it's bam-wham, out for the count, just like the dinosaurs, only faster." He dipped his pinky into the pie's whipped cream, extracted a long, deep scoop and licked it clean.

"Who'd you tell?" she asked.

He shrugged. "So far, just you. What do you think we should do?"

She glanced around the kitchen. Her eyes paused on the refrigerator door, covered with forty years of photographs; the children, vacations, their first house, grandkids, the tulips from her garden, their old dog, Buzzy, and other long-gone pets.

She stabbed her fork again snaring another thick peach piece. "I think we should get more pie," she said.