166 Rite of Passage PART 2

The Doomsday Comet, our own epoch's extinction event, was expected to slam into the Pacific Ocean and send walls of shock, conflagration, and finally continents of water to purify, purge, and wash away--in serial waves--the human race and all evidence we had ever been.

It's why 16-year-old Paulette had waxed begrudged on the absence of sex in her young life.

"It's because you're 16!" her mother, Teresa, had argued.

"The world's gonna end!" Paulette had rebutted. "I have a human right to experience sex before I'm dead and forgotten like everyone else. Who's gonna care I was a virgin? Or that I was too young?"

Teresa couldn't argue.

She knew Paulette had picked out handsome Mr. Kirkson next door to be her succubus cometae. And he'd certainly agree, because Kirkson was a tramp, his back exit a revolving door for many a walk-of-shame.

Teresa could see the physical lures of such a man. He was certainly easy on the eyes. She decided she'd close her own eyes to him with Paulette. After all, shouldn't every human experience the most powerful of physical sentiments? To die without would be the ultimate human cheat.

True, Paulette was a virgin, which was the vestal-upon-pedestal--of saving herself until appropriate; but saving herself for what?

Immolation?

How could so many experts be so wrong?

The Doomsday Comet fragmented at the Lagrange I point between Earth and our Moon, its pieces captured and shining as a reminder of how fragile and temporary life could be.

And within a year, the cometary children were born.

Yet, eight million babies, worldwide, were only a fraction of the trysts provoked by the specter of extinction, not counting women on contraception, infertility, or not ovulating; or men with vasectomies.

Condoms didn't figure in. The world was ending. Why bother?

Paulette cuddled her son, whose features, evidential of Kirkson's paternity, she enjoyed in lieu of extinction.

Teresa, likewise, cuddled her own child--Paulette's new sister--whose features were similarly telltale and revelatory of Kirkson.

Little pretty Pollux would grow up like her handsome brother/nephew, Castor: they would be raised as siblings, just as Teresa-the-mother and Paulette-the-daughter--in a strange consanguinity beyond mere offspring--would forgo parental sensibilities and be sisters forever.

Rite of Passage PART 1 at https://vocal.media/fiction/165-rite-of-passage-part-1

Continue on to the concluding epilogue, Part 3, at https://vocal.media/fiction/167-rite-of-passage-part-3-epilogue

AUTHOR'S NOTES:

For Friday, June 14, Day 166 of the Story-a-Day Challenge

366 WORDS (without A/N)

Title-accompaniment photo was AI-generated (Artificial Incineration, part 2), but the trajectory was not.

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