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