Flash Fiction

Gerechtigkeit ist blind

James Paxton Priestley

19 May 2025 — 3 min read

Image credit: A still of Burgess Meredith from The Twilight Zone episode ‘Time Enough At Last’ (1960). Wikimedia Commons.

Author’s Note: My inspiration for this piece came from a long-held, fond memory of an episode from The Twilight Zone, featuring the American actor Burgess Meredith, who died in 1997 aged 89—described one of the most accomplished and virtuosic actors of the century. The Twilight Zone episode in question was Time Enough at last, the eighth episode of that American television anthology series. Meredith played the character Henry Bemis, who ‘loves books but is surrounded by those who would prevent him from reading them.’ The opening narration to the eighth episode states, in ominous tones:

Witness Mr. Henry Bemis, a charter member in the fraternity of dreamers. A bookish little man whose passion is the printed page, but who is conspired against by a bank president and a wife and a world full of tongue-cluckers and the unrelenting hands of a clock. But in just a moment, Mr. Bemis will enter a world without bank presidents or wives or clocks or anything else. He’ll have a world all to himself… without anyone.

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Gerechtigkeit ist blind

James Paxton Priestley