key word "epiphany" title "cold comfort" in misc. flash fiction

The machine did its job, for better and for worse, it froze me in 1998 and I woke up twenty years later. My closest family dead, my last relationship a shamble, a cryogenics experiment seemed a decent idea, what with two-point-seven million dollars waiting for me at the other end of a long nap. And it worked. I didn’t even age, I should be fifty, legally I still am but biologically I reside squarely in the coveted eighteen-to-thirty-five demographic. After a month, the doctors gave me a clean bill of health and I was off to start life anew.

I hadn’t expected flying cars or anything. I’m surprised how fast the internet oozed into every corner of life, but I’d been on what I still want to call “the world wide web” for years so that didn’t really freak me out. It’s the subtler things that kill me.

While I slept, you completely ruined coffee. If you want to order a milkshake for lunch, you’re grown adults, you can do that if you want. Don’t have them add a shot of espresso then charge you extra for a fake Italian name, just order your milkshake. When coffee goes cold, you either heat it up or you throw it out, for heaven’s sakes.

While I slept, you put that casino guy into the White House. Did you ever see Back to the Future, where 1955 Christopher Lloyd can’t believe some low-rent cowboy actor became the president? From 1998’s perspective, this is ten times as nuts. As I understand it, he hosted some game show for a couple years then you made him president on the strength of that? Now that I think of it, in the sequel to Back to the Future, wasn’t there one alternate timeline where the villain Biff was a sleazy casino owner with a plasticine trophy wife? Are… are we in the bad timeline?

If you’d told me when I woke up every fifth person walking down the street would be “vaping”, I would’ve assumed you meant they were packing matter-vaporizing pistols, honest-to-God laser guns. A terrifying thrilling sci-fi kind of deal. Imagine my disgust when I discovered “vaping” was just how smokers make their nicotine fixes taste like bowls of Froot Loops. Real guns are everywhere now, of course, more ubiquitous than even vapes, some new spree shooting every other day. They’ll make assault rifles taste like cereal too if there’s money in it, these days.

I hadn’t expected flying cars or anything, but I’ll admit to disappointment. My epiphany, maybe only I can see because this all didn’t happen gradually for me as it did for you, like frogs in the warming skillet, is that I ought to get back in the tube and hope something better comes along in twenty more years’ time. It might get even worse in the days to come but I’m pretty sure it will at least be a kind of bad that makes more sense than the now does.