My dream this time, in the foggy sleep of dawn: the world had frozen over, with such stealth, speed, and ferocity so as to catch everyone off guard (surprise!)— the abrupt overnight Ice Age of the apocalypse. In the morning, the condensation of windows and doors had built up a buttress of impenetrable ice. Each of us trapped in the cold freezer of our homes. The fruitless incursion of the sun had no relevance anymore. The furnaces were stopped. The radiators clipped to their end game. All points of egress were frozen shut. It would be a slow, cold death of interior rooms, interior thoughts. I could see through the ice on the windows, and out on the fire escape: what I thought were enormous pigeons were actually large hulking vultures, somehow unaffected by the cold, short of breath, adjusting their posture, waiting patiently for the delight of a world of frozen TV dinners, the sufficient food of humans fated for extinction.