• How many people get to know exactly when they will die?

    Soldiers running out into a hail of bullets think they know. People told they will die of cancer in two weeks think they know. But none of these people know. Miracles happen every day, and you never know when you'll be struck by one.

    A man running into a hail of bullets may think he know's he will die, but how many men running into the s**t came back alive? Well certainly not zero. And what of these men coming home? How many of them thought they knew they were going to die?

    A woman lying on a hospital bed, in complete agony even with all of the painkillers, may be told she will die, but how many cancer patients have had a major turnaround? How many people who thought they knew they were going to die... really lived?

    Surely the only way one can know when one is going to die is to have seen the future as someone would see the past.

    I have seen my future as I have seen my past, and I know without a shadow of a doubt that in the next 24 hours, I will cease to be. I have know since my existence as a human being began. Since I was born,

    I knew how I would die, and when I would die.

    I came to this town because this is where my life is to end.

    You may wonder why I would come to the place I know I will die. Why am I not hundreds of miles from here, sipping a glass of wine? I tell you this now. Even if one know when his life will end, doesn't mean he can change it. The pull of your immanent death is too strong to avoid. Satan's mouth is opened wide, and he is sucking you into his fiery lungs.

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    I walked through the square bustling with people. Every single person in the square had lived a life like mine own. Each person has experienced joys and sadness. Each person in this square has memories and feelings, thoughts and ideas.

    People seem to think that their line of thinking is all that matters. That everyone else in their lives are just a cast, fill-ins, for their own particular movie... but if someone could just feel what everyone around them felt, and access all of their memories... I think that person would crumple to the ground and weep for them, and at what a fool they really were.

    The buildings in the square were two stories, nothing higher or shorter. People argued... people gossiped, laughed, talked...

    And then there was just one person. That one person, standing there amongst the people looked so out of place. His hair was black and jutted out from his head. His skin was pale and washed out. His clothes... his clothes were black as night and decorated with hair thin lines of white. This man had been there my entire life. The background figure in every setting. As a child, I would see him sitting behind my smiling mother in our school plays. I would pass him in hallways, on the street, in the bathroom. This man was always there, and yet I'd never spoken to him, nor did he speak to me. This man never spoke. This man was just always there.

    He turned and looked at me now. His dark eyes knowing and cold. There was no kindness in those black pits. One might mistake that look for murder lust, but I know otherwise. I was to die today... but it would not be by the hands of this man. It would be by what was coming next.

    I looked up into the sky, blue but gray at the same time... and I saw what I had known would come. Seven planes were passing overhead, unobserved by the other people in the square, all of them black as night.

    Still, no one had seen the planes. People went about their business clueless to the danger above.

    From the seven planes dropped seven little circles of blackness against the bluish gray sky. Seven little nuclear bombs.

    This is really the end that falls towards me...

    "Everyone!" I shouted to the people walking in the crowded space, "Look up!"

    Half of the heads in the square looked up. My voice had carried well. What followed was mass hysteria. People started running around screaming, going different directions and trampling each other. Only me and the man dressed in black stayed where we were. The bombs wouldn't be hitting the ground for a while. The planes had already gone, but the bombs still hung in the air like black stars. They were falling slowly, at their own pace.

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    Although people were panicking and screaming, no one in the entire town had left. The bombs were dropping slowly, but everyone here knew that they could not leave. They were as bound to their deaths as I was. After standing in the square for a couple of minutes, I had started walking down the roads, looking for some place to go before the bombs hit, and ended this town's life. The man who never spoke followed a little ways behind.

    Finally I just walked into someone's backyard. I did not know who owned this property. I had never seen this property. I had never been here in my entire life, yet I walked right over this person's lawn and over to a lawn chair sitting near the house. On this lawn chair lay an old man.

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    The old man hadn't protested to our being there, he didn't ask why me, or this man I did not know was standing over him. He simply welcomed us and asked us if we wanted to have a seat. I sat down, the man in the black didn't.

    I won't go over what we talked about, or the long stretches of silence that took place. I know that all you want to hear about is the moment the bombs strike the ground, and I promise you that you will hear of this soon.

    But there is one thing I have to tell you about that happened in this old man's backyard first. I don't know why it is important, but it was. So please lend me your ear.

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    "I need to stretch my legs," the old man said, pulling his legs off to the side of the lawn chair and rising to his feet. His joints cracked and popped, "Maybe I could show you my pet while you're here?"

    It was starting to get dark out.

    I said that would be just fine, and he led me over to the other end of his yard. There was a tree standing alone amongst the grass that blew in the wind. And next to this tree sat a gopher.

    "This is my pet." The old man said, gesturing his arm towards it, "I've had it for a couple of years now. Pesky bugger was digging a huge hole in my yard... I almost killed it. But there was something about the way it looked up at me, as I stood there with my shovel raised over my head, that made me feel sorry for the little guy. And what's a huge hole in your yard anyway? It's worth having a cool little guy like this!"

    The old man walked over the the gopher and pet it on the head. I started walking towards it, and the old man held up his hand in a 'hold it' gesture. "Before you come over, you have to know to watch out for the hole. A grown man could fall into a thing like that..."

    I walked over to him then, looking over him at the hole, and my mouth kind of fell slack. The hole was huge... for a gopher's hole that is. The old man was right to caution me. It looked like something that would go down forever.

    The man who never spoke had walked over to it, and stood staring in, his eyes wide, their darkness deeper than the hole itself. I looked at him for a moment, but my attention was quickly diverted as the old man started yelling. I looked at him and then up into the tree the old man was pointing at. The gopher was up in the tree, hanging from a high up branch and making a squealing like noise. Without thinking, I was up in the tree and reaching out for the little gopher. The old man was looking up at it with terror filled eyes. The little thing looked so helpless...

    I grabbed it just as it looked like it was going to fall, and climbed back own to the old man who stood there with his am holding out for it.

    The man who never spoke didn't look up from the hole for one second.

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    I walked out onto the street just next to the old man's house. He had gone to sleep, saying he would sleep through his death as the bombs tore through him. I myself would be awake. I didn't want to miss my last moments at life.

    I was just standing there on the street, looking at the few people walking down the road, their eyes buggy and terrified, when I heard the deafening sound of the bombs going off, cutting though the air as though they'd hit the ground at a hundred miles and hour instead of slowly falling to it at a snail's pace. The night lit up like day, and the mushroom cloud started to slowly blow up out of the ground a short ways away. Everything was going so slow...

    And that was when I saw the wall of fire pouring in between the buildings like a wave. The flames licked the windows and sent explosions blowing up from the stone of the homes. People on the street ran away from it, but it ate them up as it blew towards me.

    I turned around to run, useless as it may have been, and saw the man who never spoke. This was the last time I ever saw him. He was running, not away from the explosion, but into the old man's yard, full bore. His hair whipped behind him with his black clothes.

    And then the fire consumed my body, my breathing, and my life.

    It didn't even hurt.

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    If someone flipped on the television shortly after this, they would have seen this:

    1. A reporter standing there with a microphone talking about the horrible devastation that the town had fallen victim to.

    2. People running around behind him screaming and vomiting, their bodies covered in lumps and blisters. People who thought they knew that they would die, but some of which who might later possibly live. Their destroyed town looming behind.

    3. A man standing in the background, silent. His skin pale and his clothes black. His eyes piercing and his hair... his hair standing out crazily...

    and caked with dirt.


    -This is based on a dream I had last night. I had to add a bunch of stuff, but I tried to keep as close the the messed up dream as I could.