HEAT
Fiction by Eric Forsberg
I was putting my old dreams into the fireplace to keep my new life warm when it dawned on me...'the world didn't have much longer to exist'.
I telephoned my grandfather to whom I was very close (though we had never met). Still, no answer. I panicked.
"The world is coming to an end! The world is coming to an end! We only have three billion years left to live! The sun will die, the planets will implode and everything that constitutes human reality will melt into it's atomic substructure!" I had to write a note or something. Scribble our history on a postage stamp and send it into space. Set it flying towards Pluto in a balsa wood airplane with a rubber band motor, traveling at about one mile per hour. Just fast enough to leave our solar system by the time we all got sucked into the sun.
I was suddenly cold. The world was going to end and I was cold. I noticed that my fire had died down to a droplet of ash. Soon the whole room would freeze solid. I needed fuel, but all of my dreams had been burned. So I took a large stack of fears, including my most recent one about our inevitable doom and I threw them all into the empty fireplace. It worked and soon I had a bright blaze going. I thought about what had been bothering me a moment earlier, I tried to find one of my ideas but I couldn't remember a thing. All I could think of was...
"Nice Shoes".
end
it is awesome to me that you have published it again. this is most assuredly m best short-short ever. a story in a single paragraph. I learned how to do this while on a writers retreat in Vermont. the short-short is a special form - isolating a single idea into a brief story with a beginning, a middle, and an end - all in one paragraph. I have yet to master another.
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