FOUR-MINUTE WARNING

This story is well-timed. Depending on your network, if you were in the UK at 3pm on Sunday just gone, your mobile phone should have sounded an emergency alert. It brought back a lot of memories. How many of us grew up in dread of the sounding of the four-minute warning? I certainly did. In the early eighties, we lived in terror of the distinctive groan of the air raid sirens that we thought would start to sound at any moment. They used to test them from time to time, and I can still remember the sphincter-loosening fear that gripped everyone until the wailing noise was silenced. So, with the Doomsday Clock currently at ninety seconds to midnight, and the world feeling increasingly on the edge of oblivion, I wondered what I’d do now if the four-minute warning was triggered (would the emergency phone warnings give us four minutes?). I’m no actor, but I did an experiment and improvised. I set a timer for four minutes, then switched on dictation in Microsoft Word, and recorded several 240-second-long streams of consciousness conversations with myself, trying to imagine what I’d be thinking as the precious seconds ticked by. Then, I edited together the ‘best’ bits and the recurring thoughts – the lowlights, rather than the highlights.

As a writing experiment, it was interesting, but as a short story, it completely missed the mark. So, I turned the monologue into a couple’s final conversation – him on the left, her on the right. I tried to imagine what my wife and I would say to each other. One of us would go into practical survival mode, the other would inevitably be more realistic about our chances. I’ll leave those of you who know Lisa and I to decide which of us would take which approach.

Four very sobering realisations hit me while I was doing this. First of all, though I edited much of it out for this story, I wasted a hell of a lot of time rambling about inconsequential bullshit as the (very consequential) seconds ticked away. Second, there’s no way any of us could hope to do a fraction of the things we’d need to in such a short time. Third – four minutes is really no time at all (it seems to equate to two unformatted, double-spaced pages of text). Finally, there’d probably be no point trying to survive anyway. Even if I made it through the initial minutes and hours of the nightmare, I wouldn’t want to go on without the people who matter most in my life, and with family members scattered all over the place living their lives, getting everyone close would be a physical impossibility. As I recorded each of my emotional dumps, it became clear that my final four minutes would likely be spent worrying about what I couldn’t do, rather than focusing on what I’d need to do if I wanted to survive.
It’s a horrific and wholly avoidable scenario, that I pray we never have to face. For the record, doing this was very uncomfortable, and I did not enjoy it in the slightest. I’m still not sure this very short story works, but you can read it below.