Breakfast at Twilight

"Breakfast at Twilight" is a 1954 science fiction short story by Philip K. Dick.

In the story, a middle-class American family is suddenly thrown into the middle of a nuclear war. American soldiers burst into the house looking for survivors and supplies, under the family's amazed and frightened eyes. Unlike most of Dick's fiction, this short story has a positive and potentially optimistic ending. When they come back to their own time continuum during a bombing, and right before their house is atomized, the members of the family are conscious of what may happen and willing to do all they can to avoid the future. At the end of the story, the words spoken by Tim McLean, the head of the family, rekindle the hope that men can work for a better future. Tim reassures his amazed and worried neighbours by saying that the damage to his house was caused by some problems with the central heating. Then he comments, "I should have got it fixed ... I should have had it looked at a long time ago. Before it got in such bad shape ... before it was too late".

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