Millennium

by Ruth Jackson

Release: 1959
Format: Flash Fiction
Genre: Fantasy
Audience: Adults
Content: Definite Time Travel
Original Language: English

While on a walk a few days before Christmas, Bill Ebberly has a dizzy spell and momentarily finds himself millennia in the future where he learns that the world has outgrown the need for hospitals and police.

Parts of this story had the tenor of a Jack Finney story, but the characters and plot did not generate the interest that Finney’s can.

You know, you have touched upon a train of thought that has always interested me—our sense of time. Time, as we know it, is only an objective concept, like a sense of color. We here upon this earth are moving upon a plane and recognize as really existing only the small circle lighted by our consciousness, one meridian. That which is behind has disappeared and that which is ahead has not yet appeared, so we say that they do not exist.

DEBUT

“Millennium,” in Anthology of Best Short Short Stories, vol. 7, edited by Robert Oberfirst (Frederick Fell, Inc., 1959).

VARIANTS

1 English variant

TAGS(SPOILERS!)

Groupings

Cited in Time Machines by Paul J. Nahin ()

TIME TRAVEL ITINERARY: We haven’t yet mapped out the time travel itinerary.