Dallas Dornath

Final Days

            In our final days I am writing this. A short paper on what has occurred here, both great and terrible things. Who is to say which was which though? People have given their lives to better themselves and people have turned their backs on their fellow man. Nobody really knows how it all began, and nobody knows when it will end, but few regret the things they have done. Everyone simply tried to save their own skin. I did things that I’m not proud of, but I survived and that is what is most important to me. I was able to get away, making me more fortunate than many others. I get the chance to continue my life. A chance to make up for the things I’ve done and the things I thought about doing. Terrible thoughts have run through my head, but I was able to suppress nearly all. The suppression of those thoughts will drive me forward, making me better each step of the way. I will go on. I will survive.

A Few (Unrelated) Haikus

Death, the one ender

A final equalizer

Killing one by one

A dog, a small pup

Licking my nose. Lots of joy.

A cute little pup

Sleepy, Sleepy, Sleep

Blankets cover me, a warm,

Sheltering embrace.

A Different Time

            John awoke, a thin film of sweat and dirt covering his face. The boy, barely 16 had once more slept in the troves of a tree, as high up as he dared to climb. He blinked and slowly came out of his distressed slumber. He was on the run and needed to keep moving. John knew they would still be after him. It was barely dawn, and as he hopped down from the tree, he took off at a light jogging pace that he knew he would be able to keep up for a few hours.

            Now let’s go back a ways and set the scene a bit more, just for you dear reader. The time is in the distant future after a rather large-scale war. People have reverted back to the ways of slavery and there appears to be no end in sight. John is a young white male who recently ran away from his master’s house after his mother was killed by the slave drivers. John decided he had nothing more to live for and at least wanted some freedom before he would be killed by the oppressions of slavery.

            John worked in the mine on his master’s land and therefore had built up quite a good deal of strength in his few years on the earth. Resources were becoming scarce and people were paying good money for raw metals, especially what little coal was left on the planet. Due to the increasing distance and the fear of mine collapses, people began to work for little to nothing. Eventually, this reverted back to slavery, which benefitted the master’s to no end. The amount of money they brought in kept them fat and sitting in the lap of luxury. Whereas the slaves they kept were fed only the bare minimums and treated worse than stray dogs.

            John had had enough. On one dark, moonless night, he crept out of his quarters. Keeping to the shadows, and avoiding the guards, he slipped out into the woods. He was free. He sprinted as hard and fast as he could, running through the underbrush as quick as a young buck. He never once turned back; knowing if he did there would probably be a bullet between his eyes before he could blink.

            And so on and on John ran, day after day, looking to trees, bushes, small streams to keep him sustained. John didn’t know how far he had come when he ran into a break in the trees. A large, flat grassland lay before him.

Something

            Paul awoke. Above him, he could see nothing but a few tiny speckles of a blue sky between all the trees and vines. He couldn’t remember what exactly happened last night except that it was another long night of working on things he should have gotten done much earlier. Paul remembered falling asleep in a bed in his cozy flat in his apartment, but after that nothing came to him.

            Paul pinched himself to make sure he wasn’t still asleep, but to his dismay, he felt it clearly. Paul stood up. He decided to take stock of what he had. On his person he discovered simply his necklace that he always wore. Paul looked around and noticed his jacket lying on the ground not too far from where he awoke. How lucky I must be he thought, for in his jacket he always kept a lighter and his favorite pocket knife.

The humidity and heat began to get to Paul and the thought finally hit him; he was in a jungle, alone, without any food or water, without a place to rest without fear of interruption from the many animals that lived in the jungle, and without any way to contact anybody that he knew. Paul began to get dizzy and sat down to try to think of how he could approach this untimely situation.

Run, simply run and don’t stop until you can’t run anymore. That was his first thought. However, Paul shook that idea out of his head almost immediately. It was almost a laughable idea. Paul had never been any good at running long distances and he knew for a fact that he wasn’t about to start changing that anytime soon. He continued thinking, but at that moment his stomach started to rumble and growl uncontrollably. Paul was starving, he normally never went without breakfast; unless of course it was the weekend and he didn’t have any meetings, in which case he just slept through breakfast and woke up just in time to have breakfast for lunch.

Paul began to think of all the delicious breakfast foods that he used to make. Homemade double-chocolate chocolate chip muffins, pancakes and waffles were some of his favorite breakfasts to have bright and early in the morning. A good breakfast was always the best way to start off a day. And he was definitely craving some good food, but it didn’t seem that he would be having a good meal anytime soon.

Paul donned his jacket and began walking to the west, or so he thought, he never really was any good at directions and his mom and brother never let him forget it. So, on Paul trudged deeper into the strange jungle area that seemed to appear out of nowhere, wearing pajama pants and a muscle shirt and a light jacket. Paul thought to himself as he left, “I must be the strangest looking person this jungle has ever seen.”

Paul slowly crept through the jungle making sure not to touch anything too out of the ordinary looking. He especially decided not to eat any fruit that he saw even though he saw a large amount of perfectly ripened fruits that looked almost exactly like mangoes, but Paul didn’t want to risk getting horribly ill and dying alone in a far-off jungle. Paul kept walking and suddenly realized that he hadn’t heard any animals at all yet. This seemed really strange to him. All the stories he had ever heard about the jungle included all the noise from the animals that were native to the environment.

Paul got extremely nervous and stopped walking. He thought to all the television shows that he watched about survival and remembered that whenever all the animals in a certain area stopped making sounds, that a large predator was prowling the vicinity. Paul turned around slowly and started to back up against a near-by tree. Paul disregarded all his instincts telling him to hide from whatever was out there. He took off at a dead sprint dodging trees and ignoring the lashes on his face and the ripping his clothes were making from catching on the vines hanging down.

All of a sudden Paul broke into an open space and ran straight into the back of an apartment building. He recognized the building as his own apartment. “Hmm,” Paul said, “You know you would have thought that I would have noticed that I had a jungle in my backyard a little earlier than this.” Paul went inside made some hot tea and began to make some muffins all the while laughing to himself about his earlier ordeal and how he must have had an extremely entertaining sleepwalking experience last night.