Rosanna had been hunched over, cleaning a toilet when the apocalypse started.

Sweat ran down her back as she panted. The hot, sticky, chemical scent of the air of a poorly ventilated bathroom meant that her clothes would reek, and so would she. The sound of the radio blasting from the back porch between that her client was still outside doing the crossword. Her white plastic gloves had started to yellow around the glove fingers, and the plastic stuck to her hands from the sweat. The small, white tiles of the bathroom dug into her knees as she she scrubbed the toilet bowl. Then Rosanna felt the world start to shake.

Her whole body was moved by the tremors. The bathroom went dark with a crackling pop from the light of the bathroom. Rosanna crawled towards one of the walls, pressing her back to it as hard as she could. The sound of the cracking glass and tile rang throughout the small bathroom. She took off her gloves, throwing them aside as he covered her head as the sound of crackling kept going. Then the sound of popping wood, and then a final great snap.

The sound of something being crushed under a great weight, and then the sound of a car alarm. She felt something falling into her hair, like flakes of snow. Looking around, breathing rapidly, she started to crawl out of the bathroom and towards Janet’s dining table. It had felt like the world would never stop shaking, but after a minute and a half, it stopped.

The silence only lasted for a few seconds before the sound of alarms came from outside.

Then Rosanna heard the sound of sirens ringing from outsides her clients' house.

She stayed still for a moment, trying to calm down her breathing as she heard the sirens. Then she slowly rose to her feet, looking around through the darkness. She took out her phone, looking at the screen. No reception. She frowned and turned on the torch of her phone. Rosanna walked towards the light switch in the bathroom, and she reached over to the light switch before she saw the bulb flashing once, twice, before it fizzed out with a dying flicker. She turned it off. She turned the light towards the bathroom, and she let out a small gasp as she saw a large, wide crack in the shower tiles from the ceiling down to the tiled floor.

Rosanna looked around the bathroom and she saw more cracks along the walls, not as wide or as large as the one in the shower but still wide and splintering. She saw how even the plaster of the ceiling was cracked, with some small flakes of the plaster still falling. She swept her sweaty hand ran through her hair and flakes of plaster fell onto the ground. Rosanna shone the light towards the ground as she walked towards where she knew the sink of the bathroom would be. Then she shone the light towards the mirror.

It had gone from being a sink-to-ceiling mirror to something that looked more akin to a spider's web. And then she saw her. Her face was red, and sweat still hung along her brow bone. Her braided dark hair had small flakes of plaster through it, she leaned on of the more intact parts of the mirror and eyed her reflection as she reached into her hair. The plaster crumbled into tiny pieces as soon as she touched it. 

 “Fuck,” she mumbled as she reached for the end of her braid, started to undo the hairstyle that she wore at work, and started running her hands through her scalp, trying to get the flakes out. Once she was finished, she pulled her hair into a bun as she grabbed her phone and showed the light outside of the bathroom.

The rest of the house was in a similar state as the bathroom, cracks ran along the walls, and some of the windows had cracks running along them. Some of the bigger windows had even shattered. Only needing the slightest push for the glass to come stumbling out of the frame and along the floor. The house was in a similar state of darkness as the bathroom. The sound of sirens and car alarms rang throughout she could still not hear the sound that made her blood run cold. She couldn’t hear the radio anymore. Rosanna didn’t know where her client was.

The very woman that was paying her to be here to clean. 

 “Janet?” She called out into the dark house as she looked around.

Only the sound of the sirens greeted her as she moved around the house. Her stomach tightened into a sharp knot as she took in another shaking breath she started to move around the house faster and kept calling out to the older woman.

She saw Janet’s red mobility walker through the cracked glass of the back porch door. She walked towards the door, carefully opening the sliding door to not crack the window any further. Rosanna breathed out a sigh of relief as she looked towards the figure sitting on a lawn chair holding a freshly lit cigarette.

Janet had been a regular client of Rosanna since she had started cleaning. She had also been a favourite of Rosanna as Janet kept a fully stocked supply of cleaning equipment, had fresh rags every time, and Janet kept the house cool while Rosanna cleaned. 

“Are you okay? I think an earthquake has just happened, or something.” Rose said. 

 “We aren’t near any tectonic plates, so no. It wasn’t,” Janet replied, taking a drag of her cigarette after she finished speaking. 

 Rosanne felt her face heat up as she nodded, “Yeah that makes sense. What do you think has happened?”

Janet took another drag of her cigarette before breathing out a cloud of smoke, “A hostile nation has probably just declared war. Makes sense why I can’t hear myself think through all this noise. And why the sky looks like that.”

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Rosanna turned around and looked at what Janet had been looking towards. A slowly greying sky in what should have been the middle of the day. The air had felt as if it had been slowly getting colder and colder as the sun slowly faded out amongst greying clouds. She slowly sat down next to Janet on the porch, and her breathing started to become rapid as she felt like she couldn’t breathe. She felt as if she was back in the bathroom and feeling the world shake but it was just her.

Rosanna wanted the world to swallow her whole. She had made an effort to stop her anxiety from affecting her work and to keep her personal life away from her work. But it always found a way to make her life such a nightmare. And to make matters all the worse is that she was doing this in front of a client. She wanted to get up and move but her legs wouldn’t move. They felt like shaking, useless, noddles.

Janet’s strong, wrinkled, and aged spotted hand reached down into Rosanna's. Her hand was shaking as well but she still reached for Rosanna’s. The older woman’s hand suddenly turned into a life-ring and Rosanna took it with the eagerness of a drowning man. Janet’s head still faced the greying sky. She held Janet’s hand with both her hands as she felt tears roll down her cheeks. With her free hand Janet took another long and slow drag of her cigarette before stamping it out in her glass ashtray as Rosanna's breathing started to return to normal, she glanced back up at Janet. Who still held her hand with the same strong grip.

“Could I have one of those?” She asked. 

 “Don’t you know these things will kill you,” Janet replied as she held a fresh cigarette between her teeth and lit it with a steel lighter.

“How's the damage inside the house?” she asked, lifting her sunglasses at Rosanna as she clicked the steel lighter in a practised fashion.

Janet’s faint blue eyes were red and puffy. Her face was wrinkled and tanned, she had small age dots along her forehead and around her eyes. Her hair was a crown of short, freshly premed white curls that she pinned along her ears. 

 Rosanna sucked on her teeth as she looked at Janet’s hand. “It’s…” she paused for a moment. “It’s pretty bad,” she said. “But I can help clean it up. I don’t have any other clients for the day,” Rosanna quickly added as she stood up, looking towards Janet with hopeful brown eyes. 

 Janet sighed, “Go home. Go be with your family,” she waved off at her. 

 “No, it’s okay! I could just stay for an extra ten minutes or so. And there are shards all along the floor and I would feel horrible just leaving a big mess here anyways. And I would be devastated if anything bad happened to you, Janet,” Rosanna retorted back, shining her phone torchlight at the mess of glass shards amongst the carpet and tiles.

The shards on the ground glimmered as Rosanna showed the light along them. They reflected each other in a beautiful collage of colours before she moved the light to the cupboard where she knew Janet kept a small push carpet cleaner. Once the shards had been cleared, she put them into the trash. Rosanna wiped her hands along her old, faded, bleach-speckled jeans as she walked back to Janet to write her the receipt for the cleaning.

She sat down next to Janet on the porch, going through the usual motions of filling out a receipt that would get tossed into the garbage. Date, time, her signature, and then Janet’s signature. They had gotten it down to almost a minute flat to fill the whole thing out.

“Rose,” Janet’s voice broke her out of her trance as she filled out the receipt.

She looked up at Janet, who was pulling her walker closer to herself.

“Yeah, what’s up?” she asked. Janet had only ever called her Rose when it was something urgent.

Her hands easily moved into her walker’s carrier, pulling out an old leather handbag, well cared for yet still old. She placed the handbag on her lap as she spoke, looking down at Rosanna. 

“I want you to take this. It’s dangerous, a dangerous world after something bad happens, especially for young girls,” Janet spoke, her tone calm yet it held a depth of experience. 

 “I’m sure I’ll be okay. There's no need to worry-”

Janet took out a handgun.

Rosanna's eyes went wide as she stared at it, feeling any response she had to disappear from her lips. Janet had the handle of the gun towards her and the grip Janet had on the barrel was strong and perfectly still. 

 “Take it,” Janet said but her voice came out in the soft concern a mother had for her child. “Please, Rose. The world can be such a cruel place.”

Rosanna wanted to shake her head. She wanted to tell her there was no way that she could ever touch a gun. She was the last person in the world she would ever trust a gun to. And then the darkest of thoughts crept into her mind life the way a rat can crawl up a drain. 

 ‘I would think about killing myself 

Yet under Janet’s expecting gaze, Rosanna took it with a shaking grip. It felt so heavy. Rosanna could only stare at it. She turned her eyes back onto Janet, who was leaning back in the lawn chair. 

 “Go home, Rose.”