The Flash

The pain in Mark's side was immense, and yet all he could do was lay there and take it. When he had been knocked down, his back had shattered, and when he had landed on the open pair of scissors that had been knocked down with him, there was nothing he could do to stop them from slicing him open.

      His other side burned, as well. When the flash had come, just before the shock wave, the heat had grilled his left side to a blackened crisp. By his reckoning, he had around 5 minutes to live before his dehydrated, burned self died from loss of blood.

      He began to think about his life. He thought of his mother, burned beyond recognition in the yard, no doubt, and of his father. He had left so many years ago, Mark could barely remember him. He remembered playing a game of catch with his dad, and the one time his father had ever taken him out for ice cream. That was all he had of his father. He tensed up as a particularly intense wave of pain came over him.

    My father...He wouldn't have let this happen. He worked in missile control. He could have stopped this...somehow.

    He knew he was delirious now. His father would have been in New York today, for the convention on nuclear science. He would have been one of the first people to die.

    He decided he wanted his last thoughts to be less family related, and so he thought about the world. He could hear distant explosions, and he knew that his neighbor's house was on fire from the smoke and the flickering orange light.

It was the stupid North Koreans. The news man said so, right before the flash. They ruined our perfect world. Why? They got blown up with rest if us, so what was the point? What did anyone gain by this?

    His thoughts grew more and more rushed and less and less coherent as his oxygen-starved brain struggled to focus. Mark's last true thought was this:If the whole world destroyed is th cost of man's hate, what is the cost of his love?

  As his lifeless body was crushed under his collapsing ceiling, Mark thought long and hard,  just one last time:...the cost of his love...