Friday, January 04, 2008

Friday Flash Fiction: Future Perfect

After writing Frozen a couple of weeks ago in the first person, present tense, I started thinking about what other unusual tenses could I use for a story. In the end I settled on:


Future Perfect
By Gareth D Jones


By the time you read this I will have succeeded. How can I be so confident? The realities in which I will have succeeded in repairing the imperfections in the continuum will be the ones in which you will be reading this log. In those I will have ceased to exist. Does this sadden me? No. There will be plenty of versions of me living on in other realities. In these I will be sad to have failed in my mission, yet happy to be still in existence. In those realities I will have returned and deleted this log.

The imperfections will have gone when you are reading this. In fact it will be as though they had never occurred. Then why I am I writing this? In the hopes that some of you who will be reading will appreciate the sacrifice I will have made.

For you, the future will be without imperfections.



The End


Just a reminder, as it's a new year, the other Friday Flash Fictioneers who post a short story most weeks are:

Neil Beynon
Martin McGrath
Gareth L Powell
Paul Raven
Shaun Green
Dan Pawley
Justin Pickard

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I love the idea behind this one, & the use of tense. Reading it I'm not sure whether to be happy or sad... ;)

Anonymous said...

As Shaun says this is a great concept and well delivered.

I reckon you could have a lot of fun with this idea if you wanted to expand it into something longer.