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    20/20
    20/20
    20/20
    Ebook25 pages24 minutes

    20/20

    By Michael Hearing

    ()

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    About this ebook

    We all think we want 20/20 vision, don't we? But in the metaphysical and psychological realms we often prefer our accustomed blindness. It's far more comfortable. Here are two stories (approximately 6,500 words) that take a close, 20/20 look at these things

    "The Thanatos Solution" . . .

    Just a few years down the road, the new health-care plan is firmly entrenched. A new bill, Ethical Assessment of End-of Life Care, has also been enacted into law. And the authorities are ruthlessly implementing it throughout the land – no more medical resources wasted on the defective and dying, equitable distribution of quality medical care, no more lingering half-lives sustained by expensive machinery. The "thanatos solution" has arrived.

    But there are, as always, unexpected ramifications, especially for those who wanted it.

    "Elmore's Accident" . . .

    "It was that most loathsome of all things: an uncanny, routine-disrupting inconvenience and anomaly."

    That's what, as the result of an unforeseen event, unexpectedly invades and upsets Elmore Wiggins' safely ordered life. For Elmore had never reckoned on the paranormal or the preternatural. But now that he's had his accident, he is "seeing" certain events in the near future – including his own (although he doesn't know it yet).

    Despite all his efforts to live a routine, planned, and safely dull life, carefully shielded from anything out of the ordinary, Elmore now has to face the fact that there's a lot more to this life than he ever imagined. It's an irreversible lesson he learns abruptly, violently, and against his will.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMichael Hearing
    Release dateFeb 21, 2013
    ISBN9781301831029
    20/20
    Author

    Michael Hearing

    Michael Hearing is a freelance writer/essayist/novelist living with his wife, dogs, cats, horses, and ferrets on a few acres with a small lake in northeastern Oklahoma. There, he tries to grow vegetables, catches quite a few fish, and does his writing.Having lived a fairly desultory life, Michael decided that it’s time for some order and method. So he is finishing up and publishing some books he’s had in the works for many years. But, still, he is likely to be all over the genre map. In most cases, though, he has lived what he writes about, and his works ring true.

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      Book preview

      20/20 - Michael Hearing

      20/20

      Michael Hearing

      Smashwords Edition

      Spring Lake Books

      Copyright 2013

      All rights reserved. This book may not be used or reproduced in any manner—by any means or in any medium whatsoever—in part or in whole without written permission of the author (except, of course, small excerpts in reviews). Please respect intellectual-property rights and help authors protect what they've created.

      The characters and situations presented here are nothing more than inventions of the author’s imagination. If anything in these stories resembles real persons, places, or institutions, it is purely the result of coincidence.

      The Thanatos Solution

      You know, Dad, this really is for the best. Having finally delivered herself of this, the woman turned to stare out her apartment window. The tiny living room smelled of old man's incontinence.

      Yes, I know, sweetheart. I’m sure it is . . . for the best. The old man searched her inscrutable back for any signs of relenting. Discovering nothing there, he sighed and dropped his head to gaze on the rosary in his hands, the tiny crucifix dangling helplessly below them.

      His daughter rounded on him then, arms crossed and lips pressed together in a thin, hard line. After a few moments, moments filled with the loud labored ticking of her mother's grandfather clock, she spoke again: You’re not making this any easier for me. And she turned back to the window so as not to betray any more emotion.

      Yes, of course. We all have to do our part. Her father continued to sit there in his chair, on his rubber pad, awaiting the inevitable. He began to pray the rosary, the Sorrowful Mysteries, his fingers plying the beads and his lips forming the words in a barely audible incantatory fashion.

      Outside the window, the woman watched slow-moving clouds with leaden underbellies obscure the small disc of the sun. It was just discernible as a weak round whiteness behind them. Somehow,

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