the End of Everything

The End of Everything is Hig’s name for the terminal break with the world that came before. Infrastructure frayed and fell apart, while people seized on the hope that they might be among the immune; against that vast disruption, Hig’s memories and small surviving objects preserve fragments of ordinary life without suggesting that the old order will return.

Collapse and Its Human Scale

Hig recalls that infrastructure deteriorated and then failed before the end. The collapse was not an abstract change in circumstances: people faced it in a frenzy, clinging to the possibility that they alone might be immune, and to reports that resistance could run in families. The remembered hope offered a possible explanation for survival, but the account presents it as something people grasped at amid disaster, not as reassurance that the larger breakdown could be reversed.

Remnants of the Old World

A sweat-stained baseball cap marked Cherry Hills Golf Club becomes an oddly consoling relic. Hig imagines that the end might also mean the end of golf, perhaps for all time or even throughout the universe. He has nothing against the game; the thought matters because it measures catastrophe through the disappearance of something commonplace. He then imagines Scotsmen who might have survived in Scotland, still playing across misty heath, with wild sheep in place of lawnmowers and no irrigation. This is a hopeful possibility rather than a report of confirmed survivors, a small act of imagining continuity inside a world defined by loss.

Time, Memory, and Brief Clarity

The End is also registered through Hig’s altered experience of time. During a rare interval when his head seems clear, he contrasts the moment with years of thoughts that would not stay put, likening them to shaggy Norwegian horses wandering away into the trees. The comparison makes clarity feel temporary and hard-won, not a return to the mental ease of the former world. Together, the failed infrastructure, the threatened disappearance of familiar pastimes, and these uncertain pockets of lucidity make the End both a historical rupture and a condition Hig continues to inhabit.