Third Time Lucky

   Ok, so I am back for the third post! I've been doing some thinking these days, and I decided not to make any decisions (the pun was not intended) concerning the general topic of this blog. I will write whatever comes to my mind. Literature, politics, philosophy, etc.
   But let me start with a little experiment of mine: a short story called "A Path". This is an experiment for several reasons. First, it is in English and English is not my native tongue. Second, it is kind of minimalistic in the sense that not much is uncovered during the story: the main character remains a mystery in the end as well as he was in the beginning; the main event of the story is only referred to in the end of the story, and not even then it is completely uncovered. This minimalism is not really considered experimental anymore, especially not after the time of Ernest Hemingway and his "Tip of the Iceberg" theory, but it is a pretty new field for me since it is not really my style of writing.
   So, I tried. Not really successfully, but I tried. It's ok, concerning that this is my first complete English story ever. Oh, yeah, and thanks go to Erin Austin for checking the story and removing the silly mistakes I made (wow, I sound like a real writer:).


A PATH

   He walked out of the house, took a few steps and then paused to glance at the beautiful whiteness of his backyard. No, rewind. He walked out of his shitty little shack and after a few steps stopped to take a piss in his own white backyard, cursing the thing that pretty much every man knew as the prostate. But who cares about names - it hurts, that's enough.
   It was morning, time to go to work. Time to start the day. "Time to drink yourself to death again," he thought. Bad habit, but he never regretted it: After you drink a bottle of beer, the only dilemma you have is whether you're gonna drink another one. And money? Well, it always appeared from somewhere, so thinking about it might spoil the magic.
   This time the path to the local bar, the grocery store to be precise, was definitely too long. Slippery pavement, god dammit to hell, weak reflexes. He had to walk really slowly, and when he walked really slowly he would start to think. He never liked that.
   He dreamt something last night. He had been on a train that was full of people. It was early in the evening, right after sunset. He was standing in the smoky train car, unable to move much because of the crowd. He was talking to someone, obviously familiar, although the face escaped him with the last breath he drew in his sleep. Maybe it was mom.
   The person was talking to him as if he had just returned from some trip to another country. He never went abroad. Never had a chance, never had a need. But in his dream he had been somewhere, god knows where, and now he was back.
   And the person said: "Haven't they told you that this thing appeared in the sky a few days ago?" And he replied:"No, but it is so beautiful". At that moment, when he looked up to the sky, he started feeling fear.
   In the sky shone a comet. Its tail was in all the colors of the rainbow, and at first sight of its heated head, he trembled. He knew that it was going to hit the ground. All the people around him looked very calm, as if already used to the threatening sight in the sky. He, on the other hand, started feeling panic, amplified by each calm face he saw in the car.
   And then he stumbled.
   He lost his balance and almost fell down on the icy path halfway between his house and his other house. Instead of falling, he bent over and managed to steady himself on a bar on a nearby fence.
   "I dreamt something", he thought. And as he continued further down the path, he remembered the rest.
   The comet was half in the ocean when he looked again. The ocean? But he didn't have time for that. The comet was very slow, yet the impact seemed entirely inevitable. That was the most terrifying thing about the whole situation. It was so slow that it didn't even disturb the ocean surface, but he saw the power with which it descended through the air. In only few seconds, it disappeared below the surface. For a moment there was absolute peace. He looked around at the faces of the people around him who still smiled as if the whole event had been planned, as if the train trip could still continue, as if the only problem was actually the crowded car. A moment later, an earthquake began.
   He arrived in front of the store. There was a guy sitting there, already drinking his second bottle of beer. The first empty bottle was neatly put in the corner of the frozen window, the beginning of the future row. A capital project.
   "Simon?", said the guy with the bottle, looking a bit taken aback.
   "The dead dinosaurs appeared on the surface of the boiling ocean."
   Change "a bit taken aback" to "absolutely startled".
   "It was the end of the world, Michael," continued Simon in the same monotonous voice.
   "It's not the end of the world man! They died, but you're still here! Come on, man, did you go crazy overnight?"
   Simon frowned and looked away from Michael. "Who died?"
   "Monica. And Nada. Your family. They died."
   You didn't know Simon. He was a simple man, and he never had a dream like that before.