Lance Dean dove down.

He was swimming in the harbor, but now it was a watery grave—the place ships go when they die.

He remembered when his days were occupied by email.

He put his spaghetti into the microwave, and it didn’t heat-up. He depended on smoke breaks, to parcel-out his days, but he had to give that up as well, because it wasn’t health-friendly.

Eventually, progress got interrupted by nuclear weapons, thank God. The oceans rose, and the sky became black with radioactive dust. Those that weren’t wiped-out by water and fire got liver cancer.

Dean never went to the doctor, and he knew to take iodine tablets. Despite getting burned, he lived on.

Crops failed, people lost hope, but Dean relished the end of the world, with a sunset that never stopped glowing.

It’s tragic, that a man must die, while others live, he thought.

Now, he might be the last man on earth.

Before, there were too many annoyances, too many celebrities, too much traffic, too much that got between survival, and everything else.

Now, there was silence.

At first, he used a mask, but wearing one, got in the way of his breathing. Besides, his lungs needed to acclimate to the toxins in the air.

When the blue sky was clear and the green lawns were cut, Dean was depressed.

The working world ran on a clock, and the people in it, weren’t much different. They were little hands and big hands, running around and around, like cogs in a machine with no purpose.

Dean had stepped out of time, into a world that was going to die.

He was sure, that the nighttime, was the daytime, and the nightmare, was the dream he had been looking for, all his waking life.

To be continued…