In its explicit engagement with the possibility of human extinction, the Anthropocene thesis might be seen as signalling a `crisis of natality’. Engaging with two works of fiction - Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) and Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces (1997) – the paper explores the embodied, affective and intimate dimensions of the struggle to sustain life under catastrophic conditions. Though centred on male protagonists, both novels offer insights into a `stratigraphic time’ (Colebrook, 2009) associated primarily with maternal responsibility – involving a temporal give and take that passes between generations and across thresholds in the Earth itself. If this is a construction of inter-corporeality in which each life and every breath has utmost value, it is also a vision that exceeds the biopolitical prioritization of the organismic body - as evidenced in both McCarthy and Michaels’ gesturing beyond the bounds of the living to a forceful, sensate and enigmatic cosmos.