HONORABLE MENTION, Summer 2024
The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition
BY H. WHEATON
The Red Sox will not win another series for three decades. In three minutes a man who lives down the hall from us will have been hit by a car on his way to work and will die in the hospital. You won’t hear until tomorrow. We won’t be at his funeral because we didn’t really know him. His daughter won’t attend for the same reason. The next United States presidential election will end in an unprecedented draw, and the House will pick a winner, and people will be mad about it and then they will move on. The world will not end within our lifetime, which secretly upsets people. People wouldn’t like the future if they saw it now. Not because it’s horrible, or because it contains a utopia they’ll never get to see, but because it just keeps moving forward, and nothing that has come before it will ever matter. Ringo will be the last Beatle to die. The bronze statue of Henry Winkler will be melted down within the century. Several European Nations will break apart. Texas will briefly secede. We’ll eat something instant and horrible tonight and in the morning my mouth will taste like styrofoam. New Hampshire will go without a governor for the longest period in a state’s history. I will not be present for the death of my mother. The repairman will take three weeks to fix a very simple heating problem in our building. The FBI will kill several Hondurans for very poorly explained reasons. It will turn out that Axe body spray is a key component for a very easy-to-construct improvised explosive. PBS will be defunded. It will rain tomorrow. I won’t be able to convince my doctor to refill my prescription. Google and Apple will merge in less than a decade from now, after the dissolution of monopoly laws. Pop music will not die. The first person we bring back from the dead will be incredibly racist. The nights will get shorter and hotter. Florida is given to the sea as a peace offering. In 25 minutes you will wake up, and you will realize you’re late for work, and you will scold me for not waking you up, and you will have second, third, fourth thoughts. The first manned mission to mars ends in tragedy and we give up. The first and only country to be nuked in the 22nd century is Spain. We never cure cancer. We will go to a baseball game together and you will say it’s boring and I’ll deny it even though I know it’s boring too because baseball is fundamentally boring, and all digital information created before 2145 will be wiped out by a sun spot, and by the end of our century no one will even play baseball anymore. The original Portuguese dialect will be replaced by its Brazilian counterpart, which will in turn be replaced by a strange and alien tongue that defies naming. I will slip and fall in the shower and as the trauma shuts down my brain for the last time I will see my life without the future and it will be magical and it will be over and there will be one more Eels album before the band decides they’re too old to tour. Every law currently in place will be erased, then rewritten, then erased again, and we will launch another campaign in Afghanistan, and in only seven years from now, they will stop printing the cards for that card game you like, and there will be no more newspapers until we bring them back, and there will be no more cars until we bring them back, and the sea will rise and fall and the Earth will be eaten by the sun but before that we will have a wedding and it will not be as nice as either of us think it’s supposed to be—but in reality it will have been as nice as any wedding really can be. We will enter more wars, many more wars, and people will say to stop the wars and sometimes they will stop the wars but in the end we just keep having more wars anyway, and the little portable scanner things that supermarkets used to have will come back, and we will all be swallowed by a horrific sensation, and we will have a new god with a stupid name and everyone alive in five millenia will have the same birthday and we will continue to stab each other, fuck each other, starve each other, bomb each other, and it will never stop and for ages almost all we will know is pain and the brief moments when pain is absent will be called happiness and I will look over at your sleeping form and consider waking you but I will not and the sun will continue to shine for at least a bit longer after the man who lives down the hall is struck by a car.
