Ms. November

After winning a contest with my book's first page, I was disqualified from entering it again. For fun, I did a retelling of the concepts in the form of a story involving two men in a post-apocalyptic supermarket. It came close to winning, but I'm glad it didn't, seeing as I didn't have the rest of the story to take to the finals...

"This whole apocalypse business could've been prevented if Ms. November had held tangerines," Mort claimed while grabbing cans of baked beans from the shelves in the abandoned Save-U-Sum Supermarket.

"What's that even mean?" I asked. It had been about a month since that mysterious object hit, turning our world into a chaotic hellscape. Back in the day, I had a successful medical practice, a big house, a loving family. Now, it was just me and Mort, and he was nuttier than squirrel shit. Humoring him seemed like the best move.

"It's all about Entrophy," Mort explained. "Know what that is, Doc?"

"Can't say I do, but I'm guessing you're gonna tell me."

Mort always had me wondering whether he'd been a genius scientist or a street-corner philosopher before the disaster. In this post-apocalyptic wasteland, it was hard to tell.

"It's a term Dr. Stedhopper coined back in the '70s. It's like a mix of entropy, which is the tendency of the universe towards chaos, and atrophy, which is the loss of ability to control that chaos."

Mort handed me his rucksack and climbed the rickety retail shelves to grab cans from the top shelf.

"So, Stedhopper," he yelled from atop the shelf, "he noticed that entrophy followed a predictable pattern. When it spiked, Earth got more war, famine, and chaos. When it dropped, we had more peace, plenty, and order. But he also saw this pattern seemed to match the orbit of a small object circling the sun between Earth and Mars. When it got closer to Earth, entrophy shot up, and when it moved away, things cooled down. And guess what? Stedhopper realized the damn thing was creeping closer with every orbit."

"Uh-huh," I mumbled. "So, what's the point, Mort?"

"Well, Stedhopper put all this into a study called Entrophy: The End of The World, right? He meant to send it to the astrophysics journal Objects & Sky to warn humanity, right? Problem was, his secretary, bless her heart, was hard of hearing. So instead of Objects & Sky, she sent it to Objectify. You know what that is?"

"Can't say I do," I admitted as I gathered up the dented bean cans.

"It's a smut magazine where women hold objects alongside their… their bare…” Mort placed two cupped hands in front of his chest, making the universal symbol for breasts. “Ya know, for scale.”

"Oh, I see," I chuckled, shaking my head at Mort's absurdity.

"Stedhopper didn't know it, but the magazine's editors thought the end of the world would make for a killer feature in their November '72 issue. Unfortunately, folks were too busy ogling Ms. November, holding a melon and a big ol' squash, to notice the impending doom."

"Too busy gawking at boobs to see the end of the world," I snickered. "That's humanity for you."