Not written by me, but whatever

Hey, faithful readers!

The other day on one of my pier walks I decided to walk down over to the beach. As I was walking, the ocean air blowing past and me mulling over the oh-so-many stories I was writing, I saw a book half buried in the sand.

I hopped over some logs and went to pick up the book. I wouldn’t normally do this, but there was no one else around and the tide was coming in.

I would guess that the book was pretty old; the pages were yellowing and some had even fallen out. It was textbook-sized and seemed to be some sort of compilation of (copied) articles, data, and facts. While the articles are in English, everything from the cover to the index are in some Eastern European language. Russian, or some such. The sections the articles were grouped in, from what I gather, are plants, animals, and people. There is also a fourth group, the largest group, that I can’t seem to find any kind of theme or pattern.

The most memoral bit that I read before I got bored came from this fourth section.

The heading was near the bottom of the page (above was an article about a house that burned down or something).

The heading read: “The Worlds Shortest Horror Stories,” in big Impact font.

There were two entries. There might have been more, but if there were they were cut off. The first one read as follows:

“The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door.”

The next was shorter by one letter:

“The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a lock on the door.”

I looked them up on google and it turns out that the second story (which was based on the first) was submitted into a (scary story(?)) contest and actualy WON. I’m not sure how I’d feel about that if I had been a participant.

Anyway, the second story, if you think about it, raises some questions, the foremost being: is the lock on the inside or the outside?

If the lock was inside (and assuming that the man is indeed the last person on earth (let’s not do the whole ‘there’s still the last woman on earth’ thing, kay?)), surely the lock is unnecessary, right? What is he keeping out? If whatever force (aliens, a virus, zombie apocolypse, war, etc) was strong enough to eliminate every other human, then surely a single measly padlock would do next to nothing in regards to stopping it (or anything else, really).

The fact that the man feels the need to lock himself away from the dead could have psycological implications as well. (The placebo effect of the lock, the ‘security blanket’ role it performs, the man ‘locking himself away from society’, and so on.)

Alternatively, imagine the lock is on the outside. How’d it get there? Was it some last ditch effort by the 2nd-to-last-person on earth to ensure that SOMEONE survived was spared? Or was it some malevolent force at work? Is the lock WHY he’s the last man on earth? The prison temporarily saving his life?

For the second story the question is, instead of what he’s keeping out, what is keeping him in?

And, you know, starving to death in a locked room with the knowledge that you’re completely and utterly alone would be a pretty awful way to go.