William I. Lengeman III is a good guy. His web site, 499-Word Tales For The Modern Age, is located at http://wileng.home.mindspring.com.

                                                                          double bullet theory


Jack threw back another shot, slammed the glass on the table and raised the gun to his temple. What was the point of going on, he wondered? His life was winding down and it was becoming clear that the glories of yesteryear were gone forever - though he was doomed to continually relive them. His day in the sun had given way to murky night.

His heart pounded. The barrel wavered slightly. The red numbers on the clock radio were changing from 1:26 to 1:27 as he squeezed the trigger.

The gun roared and he winced as a burst of flame rushed from the barrel, singing hair and skin. The bullet exited the barrel and thudded into the softness of his temple. Upon entering it took a sharp downward turn, caroming through his neck and torso and bouncing around in his abdominal cavity like a marble in a coffee can, before heading straight down into his left leg.

He felt only a strange tickling sensation – and the pain of the powder burn. The bullet exited his leg just above the knee and slammed into the apartment wall. It passed through the palm tree outside the apartment and then whizzed past the tail of the third in a row of ducklings plodding with their mother to the stream next to the golf course and approximately two hundred more feet to Walnut Lane where it passed through the rear windows of a battered Chevette, whose driver did not hear the slight ping due to the fact that she was blasting the song Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport, by Rolf Harris, at a volume considerably louder than that at which it should be heard.

The bullet then ricocheted off the side of a dumpster and took on a slight upward trajectory, which carried it over the western part of the city, past the suburbs and into the wooded foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, just north of Yosemite National Park.

Somewhere on the eastern side of the mountains the bullet fell into a disruption of the space-time continuum caused by time manipulation experiments being carried out with an improperly shielded device two hundred years in the future.

The bullet inexplicably took a sharp turn north of Las Vegas and began heading more or less in a southeasterly direction. After about thirteen hundred miles it entered the outskirts of Dallas, traversing the city until it ended up in Dealey Plaza.

There it collided with a bullet fired by the gunman an instant earlier, just a split second before it impacted its intended target. A Secret Service man looked around, but both bullets clattered to the ground unnoticed. The motorcade continued on its merry way and no one was the wiser.

The gunman looked at his rifle. He was a skilled marksman and he couldn’t even begin to imagine how he had missed. He looked down, deciding whether to reload, but his window of opportunity had passed. It was too late.  

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© 2003 William I. Lengeman III