The Last Day of
Life on Earth
24.
On the last day of life on earth, a
little boy asked his mother for a drink of water, and she smiled and kissed him
on the forehead.
23.
In Chicago a bartender walked
outside and stared at the sun for a minute.
It didn’t look like rain.
22.
A 14-year old girl raced her mom’s
Ford Mustang as fast as she could down the hot center of a two lane blacktop
heading toward a reservoir.
21.
A man named John couldn’t remember
what his friend Bill asked about years ago in the last moments of his
life. He knew it was something about the
Sierras and a trip they took when they were in college, but he couldn’t
remember.
20.
A truck driver pulled over to the
side of the road. He had to pee and it
was another 40 miles to Davenport, Iowa.
19.
A new bride turned to the last page
of her novel to see how many pages she had left. 434.
18.
The TV set went blank, and a fellow
named Jim was really annoyed and reached for his remote.
17.
A priest missed the lentil soup his
mother used to make. She used mushrooms
that came all the way from Poland.
16.
A single guy named Fred opened up
his refrigerator and wondered what his last meal would be. He didn’t see any beans and wondered too if
it was too late to buy some.
15.
Outside of Gretna, Virginia, a
part-time farmer and preacher named Charles dropped to his knees in the field
and started praying. He had joy and fear
in his heart.
14.
The sky in the east was starting to
cloud up just like it did the day before.
13.
A writer wrote a sentence about God
and then he wrote another about the devil.
Finished, he read them aloud in wonder.
He had never written about either before.
12.
A marmalade colored cat ran across
the street for no apparent reason. A man
sitting at his study window watched the cat and wondered why he did it.
11.
Another man repeatedly smashed the
wall in his living room with a hammer.
At last there was an opening wide enough and tall enough for him to pass
through.
10.
The radio was on in a house where a
father blindfolded his wife and two daughters and shot them before killing
himself. The radio was playing an old
Bruce Springsteen song, something about being on fire.
9.
The star of the most popular show
on TV sat alone in her bathroom drinking a sloe gin fizz. She wished her partner was home. She wanted to make love.
8.
A woman finally sat down at the
kitchen table. She had been running
around for hours getting this meal ready for her husband and now it was done.
7.
In the apartment next door, the
phone wouldn’t stop ringing.
6.
Sheila had been stuck in traffic
since lunchtime. Hungry, she wished she
had something in the car, even a cracker would do. She put her thumb in her mouth and licked the
salt off it.
5.
A boy named Larry played a game he
loved on his iPad. His mom was yelling
at his dad in the other room, and he didn’t want to listen. He looked around for his ear buds.
4.
Chari sat in the bathtub. The bubbles had gone flat and the water was
starting to cool, but she didn’t care.
3.
Frank wondered what tomorrow would
be like. He liked this life even with
all the bullshit his job put him through.
He couldn’t imagine a better way of living.
2.
In the sky above Wichita, Kansas,
an old man in a giant balloon drifted east toward the clouds coming toward
him.
1.
THE END
______
My story originally appeared in the Atticus Review: https://atticusreview.org/the-last-day-of-life-on-earth/
No comments:
Post a Comment