Last Night at the Movies

I dreamed I was in the back seat of a car driving north along the Mississippi. It was late afternoon. I remember looking eastward and seeing the broad water glare suddenly with fiery light and there was a roar unlike thunder. The sky was clear, but marked with something like jet contrails. It happened again and again: the light and the earth-shaking noise.

“Are those meteors?” I asked finally.

There was an embarrassed silence. Everyone else seemed to know what was going on, and no one else seemed to think it unusual.

“I guess so,” someone up front said finally.

Someone beside me suggested that we leave the car and go down by the river’s edge. The theory seemed to be that the river bluffs would give shelter from the meteor impacts. It sounded pretty naive.

Nobody else said anything. The meteors continued to fall.

We were deep in the city now, still going north. It was strangely empty.

We passed an intersection where a woman stood, an infant in her arms, next to a stalled car. A cop in a Ramsey County sheriff’s uniform was walking indifferently away from her toward his own vehicle, talking on his radio. I met the woman’s gaze as we passed; her eyes were darkly ringed, despairing.

“Shouldn’t we go back and give that woman a ride?” I asked.

Nobody else said anything. The meteors continued to fall. We drove on north through the gathering dark.

About JE

James Enge is the author of the World-Fantasy-Award-nominated novel Blood of Ambrose (Pyr, April 2009). His latest book is The Wide World's End. His short fiction has appeared in Black Gate, Tales from the Magician's Skull, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and elsewhere.
This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

8 Responses to Last Night at the Movies

  1. Anonymous says:

    That was a dream? Well written. How many hours a day have you been writing/editing lately?

    –Jeff Stehman

    • JE says:

      Yes, I dreamed it, woke up, couldn’t sleep, got up to blog it, lay down again, still couldn’t sleep. It’s happening more and more lately, only without the interesting dream, usually.

      Not sure about hours–I worked on the book pretty hard on Saturday. I didn’t think it was that much on Sunday but, when I got up from the computer around 10 PM, I realized hadn’t paused for lunch or dinner.

Comments are closed.