Well, here's a little ditty (not about Jack and Diane growing up in the heartland) that is rather short. It's about 658 words to be exact. I tried to extend it, but could never really get it to go anywhere. The initial thought was that all of the characters would have names taken from Flash Gordon. Not sure how you could work those into a serious story: "'Flash, Zarkov, would you two like a cup of tea?' Asked Princess Aura." Wouldn't work. As such, there is only a Dale in this story. So, here you go....
Memory of the Future
I am sweating, breathing heavy. My blood is a fist. I drink in the July air. This is real, I think. This is temporary. These thoughts, however, occur on some intellectual level that is disjointed from my heart that feels otherwise. It seems a lie despite being the truth. But, if I feel the lie, believe the lie, it is no lie at all. Not to me anyway. My fingers eat the sheets and slowly exchange the dramatic scene of only moments ago with the nightmare shadows of my bedroom. Those images. That final image. It was only a dream.
My mind clears.
I do not believe dreams are premonitions of things to come. The future is not some groomed, predetermined landscape with paths that are defined by where they lead to. It is an undetermined jungle filled with apathetic extinction and rebirth. And, unless there is some kind of logic polluting concept as memory of the future, things yet to come cannot take form in the subconscious rants that are housed in my sleep. We are not particles where our end state can affect that of our beginning.
I look at my wide eyed image in the dresser mirror and think, this is real. I feel my panic fade and realize, this is temporary. Still, my own image chills me. A cool hand touches my own, prompting me to look down at my wife as she lay next to me.
“Lay back down. Go to sleep,” she says.
Dale is more asleep than awake and will not remember this in the morning. Furthermore, we will not share the memory of me holding her and quietly saying, “we’ll be okay,” followed by, “I love you” as a massive storm sends semi-trucks, trees and people through the air. We watched the devastation from our car, which was wedged against a guardrail. She will never know of that whispered lie I said to her – it’s okay – before what was certain to have been our deaths if I had not woken. It was only a dream, I repeat to myself. I lay back down.
“Everything all right?” she asks.
“I’m okay,” I say and feel cold guilt because I know this to be true, but feel otherwise.
I hear the wind howling outside. Its intensity increases with a slow building rage and as the first thwacks of random debris hit the house, I think of my dream. It is a vocal reminder, an expression of some fury I do not quite understand. Something dying. Something being reborn.
Rumors; there have been many rumors. The sunspots would cause deadly storms. It would be the end of everything two hundred years of industrialized society has given us. But, the government quickly dispensed with these notions, cracking down on those who espoused such ideas as being dangerously provocative and responsible for inciting panic. Initially, the groups who spoke of coming disaster were dismissed as the purveyors of quackery. But, when the scientist started to speak out, notice was taken and they were quickly marginalized.
I also dismissed what I considered to be conspiratorial doomsday scenarios. I knew – I know – better than to be seduced by such paranoia. Still, as I lay next to my wife and remember the coming finale of my dream, a large title wave rising over the horizon and rendering the sun to darkness, I begin to only feel. Knowledge becomes ambiguous and naïve.
I get out of bed and go to the window, realizing I can still smell the salt water from my dream. Piercing the blinds with my fingers, the night bleeds in and I see the beginning of the end. It was not just a dream.
“What are you doing,” asks Dale.
“Get your clothes on; we’re leaving.”
I speak with the calmness of a man in shock. I know nothing, but feel everything. It is my only truth left. This is real, I think. This is forever.
I myself felt like an insect about to go under, attacked by annihilation in this world ready to go to sleep. - Knut Hamsun, 
), take a look at this book. Hell, even read it. Hamsun published Hunger in 1890; consequently, it predates the aforementioned novels. He would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. He would also, however, go on to be an ardent supporter of the Nazis, only being spared from charges of treason (he was Norwegian) because of his mental state. Despite this "supposed" mental state he went on to write another book. So, sounds like they should have actually taken away his food, given him a typewriter and let him write a sequel to Hunger until his organ functions eventual gave in to starvation. Like H.P. Lovecraft and his racism (and distasteful names for cats), Hamsun is unfortunately an example where we must read and appreciate the work he had done despite his severe character flaws.
