A Political Portent

A message from the future.

It was election season, so I was used to getting dozens of unsolicited emails a week from scam PACs and campaign offices for candidates I’d never heard of in states I’d never lived in. Many of them had the spoofed number designed to look like one from your own area code, as if any of us were still the type of people who picked up the phone or responded to strangers just because their phone number happened to have the same area code as our own did.

Curiously, this one came from my exact same phone number.

Even more curiously, the timestamp on the text was the exact month and day and time that the text had been sent, but from four years in the future.

And most curious of all, the message was in the form of a haiku, and I hate poetry. And it was a warning against something I’d never in my life considered doing.

Whatever you do —
and I know this sounds crazy
— don’t run for Congress

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Word Count: 173

Form: Haibun

Prompt: Write a story or poem in which your phone buzzes with a text message sent from your own number, dated four years in the future. It contains only three words. Use Sci-fi as one of your genres.

Written for: "The Writer's Cramp"