last night on earth part 4/5 please critique PLEASE?!?!

by smg

Posted to Stories on 2002-11-05 16:22:00

The bar is filled with people. All of us have had the same recurring dream the past few weeks. Slight variations of course, but the same theme and message: humanity will cease to exist on the eighth Thursday of the year. Why the eighth Thursday none of us has figured out. Sheila, the woman sitting at the bar with the red dress and black trench coat, thinks it’s a government conspiracy of some sort. Carla, the woman I’m on top of, says it has something to do with planets and magnetism and the will of the universe. I say it’s just because. Thursday’s as good as any other day. An arbitrary day, picked for its randomness if nothing else.

I came here tonight looking for companionship. Everyone in the world has not shared our dream it seems, but those that have, the “dreamers,” have congregated in their sanctuaries of choice: bars, churches, synagogues, shopping malls; wherever similar dreamers go to find solace.

The bar is my sanctuary. Other people, with similar forgotten goals and depressing lives, assuming positions and attitudes like mine, comfort me. Tonight especially. I want to talk to them, see if they know more than I do. Tomorrow is Thursday and I wonder how humanity will end. Will there be a thunderbolt to strike us down? Will the tides rise and engulf us? Will we just blip out of existence?

These are my thoughts as I climax with Carla. Her fingernails digging into my biceps brings me out of my reverie.

“What are you thinking about?” she asks, still trembling and out of breath.

“Tomorrow. How it’s going to end.” I roll off her and onto my stomach.

“You can’t change anything you know.” She slides off the dirty bed and walks to the sink to clean herself. “You should just live it up this last night. You’re the fourteenth person I’ve fucked tonight.”

I sit up and realize I don’t have a condom on.

“Don’t worry honey, AIDS ain’t gonna get you before tomorrow.” She steps back into her jeans and walks down the stairs into the bar, looking for number fifteen.

I walk to the broken mirror above the sink. My eyes are red from lack of sleep and too much drinking. I haven’t shaved in days and there’s a mysterious cut on my nose. I look like shit. No worse, really, than any of the other dreamers, but that isn’t saying much.

The bed smells like sex and beer, there’s stains on it older than me, but it’s a place to sit and wait.

xxx

I’m in my dream again, the one telling me about the eighth Thursday. I’m not scared like I was the first few times, and I’m not mad like I was the rest of the time. I think I’ve reached acceptance and I take what the bike messenger gives me.

It’s a dynamic dream; the scene and characters change, but the plot and theme never do. The first Thursday dream I had happened almost a year ago. I was lost in a forest and Merlin came to rescue me. But instead of transporting me to safety, he turned into a dragon and ate me alive. In his stomach, I met a dolphin that told me the world was going to end on the eighth Thursday of the next year. That’s the most fucked up Thursday dream I’ve had, the others have been more normal, if you can call them that.

In this dream, a bike messenger comes to my home and gives me a telegram. It’s to me, from anonymous. It says, “World ending. Stop. Eighth Thursday. Stop. Tell no one. Stop. Inevitable. Stop.” A dynamic dream, as I said, and while the same message is still there, I’m not so worried about it; I’m more preoccupied by the idea that people still use telegrams in the age of email and cell phones.

In my dream, I wonder who “anonymous” is, why he won’t just come out and fucking tell me who’s ending the world. That’s what I really want to know. Is it God, Satan, Bob from down the road? The bike messenger shrugs his shoulders and puts his hand out for a tip.

xxx

There’s a black woman on top of me, fucking me as I sleep. “What the hell are you doing?” I ask as I come out of my dream. She’s beautiful.

“Riding you, baby. Just relax.” She knows how to get herself off, and screams as she comes on me. “Was it good for you?” She smiles and pulls her skirt back down.

After she leaves, I stand in front of the mirror, washing her scent off me. Maybe it’s best the human race is coming to an end. In a world where someone gets off on a sleeping man, maybe life isn’t worth living. Or maybe people are acting this way only because things are ending. I laugh, realizing I’m pondering philosophical questions with my dick in my hand in the upstairs fuck-room of a skeazy bar. I go back downstairs for a drink and to wait with the others for Thursday to come.