The asteroid was visible through the grocery store’s front windows, a smear of orange light growing larger by the minute, and Denise Kowalski was still scanning items at tone four because nobody had told her she could stop.
“Paper or plastic?” she asked the man with the cart full of bottled water and canned beans.
“Does it matter?”
“Store policy is I have to ask.”
“Plastic.”
Behind him, the line stretched back into the cereal aisle. Fourteen people deep. Some were crying. One woman was on the phone telling someone she loved them. A teenager was filming the asteroid through the window, narrating for an audience that would never see the video.
“Could you open another register?” the man with the beans asked.
“Kevin’s on break.”
“On break.”
“He gets fifteen minutes at two o’clock. It’s two-twelve.”
The man stared at her. Denise stared back. She’d been working at FreshMart for eleven years and she’d survived three managers, two renovations, a pandemic, and the time a woman tried to return a Thanksgiving turkey in February. An asteroid was just another Tuesday.
“That’ll be forty-seven sixty-three.”
He paid with a credit card. Denise didn’t know if credit cards would still work in forty minutes. She didn’t know if anything would still work in forty minutes. But the machine beeped and the receipt printed and the routine held, which was the only thing keeping her hands from shaking.
The next customer put a bottle of champagne and a pack of Oreos on the belt.
“Nice combo,” Denise said.
“My wife’s favorite. Both of them. She’s in the car.” The man’s voice cracked. “She can’t walk anymore. I told her I’d be right back.”
Denise scanned the items fast. “Go. On the house.”
“I can pay.”
“I know you can. Go.”
He took the bag and ran. Through the windows, Denise watched him sprint across the parking lot, the asteroid growing behind him like a second sun.
The next customer set down a single birthday card. The kind with a cartoon dog on the front.
“My daughter turns seven tomorrow,” the woman said. She was calm. Too calm. The kind of calm that’s holding something enormous underneath. “I bought the present last week but I forgot the card.”
“You want to sign it here?”
The woman nodded. Denise handed her a pen from the cup by the tone. The woman wrote inside the card for a long time, bent over the counter, and when she finished her eyes were red but her hand was steady.
“Two ninety-nine,” Denise said.
“Keep the change.” She put down a twenty and walked out with the card pressed against her chest.
Kevin came back from break. He looked at the line, looked at the window, looked at Denise.
“Should I open register six?”
“Yeah, Kevin. Open register six.”
He opened tone six. The line split. People shuffled forward with their carts full of things that wouldn’t matter in half an hour but mattered right now. Water. Bread. Dog food. Birthday cards. Champagne for a wife who couldn’t walk.
Denise kept scanning. The beep of the tone was steady and rhythmic, the sound of ordinary life refusing to stop just because the sky was falling.
At 2:38, the lights flickered. The asteroid filled the western sky, beautiful and terrible. Someone in the cereal aisle started singing “Amazing Grace.” Others joined in, badly, the way people sing when they’ve given up on sounding good and just want to be heard.
Denise scanned a jar of peanut butter. Beeped a bag of apples. Smiled at the next customer in line.
“Paper or plastic?”
