Not the End
He dug his bloody hand out of the garbage dumpster. He was so hungry but all he encountered was a jagged piece of glass. Apparently, others had beaten him to the scraps it had once contained.
What a year 2020 had been! First, he had been fired from his job at the real estate firm. No one was buying houses because they had lost their own jobs. Soon his money ran out. A mix up in the unemployment fund left him without cash. He was able to go without paying his mortgage for a few months before the bank repossessed his home. Now he lived in his broken down car in the parking lot of Walmart. Betsy, his wife, went home to Mama. At least, Mama had social security. His brother died in the corona virus as did his parents. He hoped he would not get sick since he had lost his health insurance.
He grasped at the straw of 2021 just around the corner. Soon that crazy President would be out of office. The President believed that the severity of Covid19 was a figment of everyone’s imagination and that “poof”, it would vanish. The vaccine would be here any day, the President assured the people. Milk and honey would soon bathe the land and everyone would prosper once again.
Exhausted from all this turmoil, the homeless man woke up to find a large dog pawing at him and whining. “Oh my God, it was Homer!” His dog was still with him! He rubbed his reddened eyes and looked around him. It was the year 2021 and it had all been a frightening nightmare. 2020 had never happened, the United States had a different President and corona virus had been contained at the beginning of 2020. The past year had been a horrific hallucination. He looked at his sweet, sleeping wife beside him on the bed in his house. His brother and parents were still alive. He laughed and laughed as he realized that 2020 had never happened and 2021 was just beginning.
