“When is the end of the world?” he asked, looking up to ascertain the position of the stars in the cosmos. “Deneb has yet to wink out, while Orion’s lights still burn strong.”

She laughed, saying, “None of that matters—just archaic nonsense. Come, we have a demon to invoke.”

Kevin DeLuca is a writer of weird fiction and fantasy. He was short-listed for the 2014 Fish Flash Fiction Prize, and has been published in Flash Fiction Magazine.