Hello friends!
I’ve been thinking about a specific short story that somehow stuck with me and wriggled its way back into my consciousness many years after high school. The problem is I can’t find anything on Google, so it’s possible this isn’t a famous or professionally written piece of fiction. Allow me to explain:
In high school, we were “forced” to read English literature. Now, I thought this was a great time. Up until that point I had to read Dutch literature, which was obviously more limited in size and scope as a body of work since the language isn’t spoken (or written down) by many people.
Pretty much everything I can remember is super easily identifiable. Your typical Orwell stories, classic sonnets, you name it. But one story I can’t seem to be able to identify. From what I can remember, the story was about two criminals trying to escape the law somewhere in the US in desert towns. I think they were particularly nasty individuals. At one point, they arrive somewhere and in their efforts to hide out attempt to threaten people, only to find out the people in their little town aren’t people at all. They’re dolls, placed there for what is then revealed to be some kind of nuclear blast test. Karmic justice ensues when the actual bomb is about to be dropped.
I might misremember some of these details, but I’m not that old yet so I’m pretty sure I didn’t make it all up. My main question therefore is if anyone recognizes this to be an actual identifiable work of fiction or if this was somehow maybe just some casual writing someone did and my teacher decided to examine that (if so, well done to this amateur writer). Please help me out, this has been driving me nuts for a while now.
by MiniatureOuroboros