My loyal readers, last night during fiction writer group meeting we were given a writing prompt for next month that dealt with the end of human existence on this planet.
Here is my personal thought on the subject. We as a species are mortal. We all will eventually meet our personal demise, whether alone or in some horrendously dramatic public spectacle that will be viewed by millions of people around the world. That being said our experiences of the past tells us that the end of the world has come many times to many people throughout history.
I wish to gauge from you three stories that I will write and the most popular I will present to the fiction writers’ group next month: The first one I’m going to call Asteroid. These of course will be something might occur in our future, though the dinosaurs experienced their extinction from such an event over 60 million years ago. The second I will name Pompeii that historically dealt with the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius and the pyroclastic flow that killed hundreds of people in 79 AD. Finally, third story will be about the tsunami that struck Japan on March 11, 2011.
Since it is fictional, the characters are products of my imagination, and with the exception of the first story, will be nearly as accurate as I can make it using search engines and other reliable resources. So, with further ado, let’s begin with the first story.
Asteroid
I awoke from a terrible dream. I can’t make heads nor tails of it except I felt myself flying and the exhilarating feeling suddenly turned to terror as I saw a deep cavernous hole suddenly appear and I was sucked inside Earth itself.
I’m Michael Cunningham of Rochester New York. I live in a basement at my mom’s house after Dad left. I work at McDonalds and don’t own my own car. I don’t even drive, relying solely on public transport to get me to work and back. My gen z architype, maybe even stereotype is me to a tee.
I reached beside my bed and opened a gallon jug of water and drank down a goodly amount, spilling some onto my t-shirt and mouth. My hands still shook from that dream. I crawled out of bed and went upstairs, grabbing my I-phone 14. The house was dark. Mom was at work working for the hospital as a lab technician or something of that sort.
I turned on the app and watched Sports Center on ESPN. The talking heads spilled double-speak monologues of this team or that team or that sport or this sport, using platitudes, witticisms, quips and simple phrases to keep us dummies entertained and describing the play-by-play highlights as if our teams were the most important in the universe.
I was about to nod off when someone else suddenly and for no rational reason began telling us of an asteroid coming here to this planet called Earth. It had somehow ricocheted off one of Jupiter’s moons, and like a careen of a cue ball off the six was barreling toward this planet at four hundred times the speed of sound; really fucking fast.
“Is this for real?” I asked myself. I was thinking but not fully aware of what in the hell I was supposed to do. I wondered briefly if this was what those poor dinosaurs must have felt or thought just as the asteroid that slammed into the Gulf of Mexico. It had to have sucked to be them on that fateful day 65 million years ago.
“Where is this supposed to hit? Do I have time to pack my bags? Will The Russians launch their nuclear missiles at this thing? Do they have time? Do we have time? What time is the dooms day clock set at?”
I asked myself all these questions while this talking head journalist with his sober expression sat behind his anchor desk and calmly told us we were all going to die in a manner of hours if not minutes.
I called Mom to see what she wanted me to do.
Obviously, cooking chicken soup was out of the question.
“Mom,” I called her in a frantic, nearly panic-stricken voice. “Have you seen the news?”
“Are you smoking pot again? I’m at work, in a lab in a basement. I don’t have time to watch TV.” Then there was a brief pause. “Why? What’s going?” She read my voice like a deaf person read lips.
“I just saw this special report of an asteroid coming to Earth.”
“You are smoking pot. I knew it! Do me a favor, quit that shit and get yourself a real job. You’re wasting my time with…” The connection went suddenly dead. For some reason I glanced outside through the bay window that faced south on our east to west street and saw this wonderful sunrise. The prettiest sunrise I’ve ever seen…
Jerry Schellhammer 