"At the End of the World, You Love Whenever You Can" by JP Relph

Early on, when food remains on ransacked shelves and you can find still-crisp apples rolled into dusty shadows and your mouth fills with saliva at the expectation of sweetness, you love a fighter called Medhi. He had a different life to you, up to this point, a brutal life that inadvertently makes him apocalypse-suited. You are soft when the world falls, softer than dust-matte apple skin, and he makes you feel safe for a while. In a looted sleeping bag you consume his affection like fresh fruit, somehow knowing it won’t last, can’t last. It’ll wrinkle and darken and blur with mould and you’ll slip from the crushed feathers, Medhi’s knives in your boots, and go looking for new sanctuary in other dusty shadows. 

Later, when stores are trashed and full of stink and the last apple you eat is from a gnarled tree and so sour, your stomach burns for days, you love a follower called Nadine. She’s part of a group of shattered souls drifting from one broken place to another, certain a safe haven must be over the next hill. She tattoos brambles on your inner wrist. You are like them, she says, lush, the perfect balance of sweet and sour. You mask your thorns and give in to a closeness with Nadine, who is warm and bright even in blackberry-dark basements and her passion makes you almost believe in havens right up until the screaming starts and she’s torn from you, and torn apart. 

Much later, when food is snared and skinned or scavenged from the new dead, you trade cans for dried plums and love a preacher called Angel. His church is a motel off a lonely road and his flock are hollow-eyed women and manicured men made killers. Angel uses a crossbow, way back in the trees, so his hands are never blood-spattered when he pulls you onto the grubby mattress and his mouth tastes like crabapple memories. He accepts what you have become and you’re grateful. When the church falls, in a biblical battle of fire and blood, Angel is way back, hands clean, in a way. You leave him sermonising about God’s Will to the various dead. You think maybe it’s time for demons. 

Too late, when you trade your own spoiled flesh for slivers of canned peach, your heart feels like the peach’s stone, devoid of flesh, yet you love a tyrant called Desmond. His leather-sweat body swallows your self-loathing, spits it out. Thrust down into blood-soaked earth, your breath falters. The thought you could die and be buried in one groaning moment is a kind of oblivion. Loving and fighting are dirty now; rage and passion mangled together. When Desmond bores of you, his eyes find a desperate girl, more bone than flesh, more child than girl. Shadow-hidden, you slide your knife into the base of his skull, not sure who you’re saving, then you creep into the woods with the dead and the night swallows you. 

Just in time, when food is grown and reared, you stash your knives under a real bed, feel strawberries burst sun-sweet between your teeth and you love a healer called Sorrel. She uses rewilded nature to soothe and repair and in her gentle embrace, something crumbles inside you, and your heart rewilds too. This love cleanses; you struggle to deserve it, but Sorrel soothes. You speak of all the lovers, their sins and desires part of you like faded brambles. You love whenever you can, whoever you can, Sorrel says. Nothing lasts: not apples or lovers or the dead. So, eat now. Love now. Then autumn arrives, and you find hope, still-crisp, in mist-chilled fruit and in yourself at the start of the world. 

JP Relph is a Cumbrian writer hindered by cats. Tea helps, milk first. She mooches around in charity shops looking for haunted objects. JP writes about apocalypses a lot (despite not having the knees for one) and her collection of post-apoc short fiction was published in 2023. She got a zombie story onto the 2024 Wigleaf longlist, which may be the best thing ever.