A Runaway Bullet Runs Through Our Town
Sam Pisciotta
Sometimes it ricochets off the side of a building or pings the hood of a car. I fucking freeze. Like Pavlov’s dog, I can’t help myself. I might catch a burst of sparks at the point of contact, but otherwise, I can’t see the goddamn thing. That’s what’s so scary about it; I never see the runaway bullet coming. I hear the whiz and the whine as it tumbles past my ear. Too late. I taste the burnt air sticking to the back of my tongue. Too late. I watch it pierce into some guy’s chest and explode from his back and the poor motherfucker is dead before he hits the ground. Too late.
A runaway bullet is like the lottery in reverse. That feeling in the pit of my stomach is not hope and expectation; the daydreams it elicits are not dreams of buying a bigger house or traveling to Iceland or secretly paying off the mortgages for friends and family. I have never stood in a line to buy a better chance of catching it. The runaway bullet is nothing like that; it’s about dread and nightmares and hiding behind the walls of our houses.
I’m walking past a schoolyard on 32nd and stop to watch some kids jumping rope. They’re swinging Double Dutch. I had a little brother and his name was Johnny; he played in the street and his smile was funny. Their hands are steady circles as they spin the ropes in crisscross arcs between them. Jump in. Jump out.
When I was a kid, I saw some older students catch the runaway bullet. It was on Channel 13 news, and it was the first time I’d ever seen a massacre. (I grew up fairly sheltered and privileged.) My parents were watching TV, and I was supposed to be doing my homework. They didn’t know I was standing in the doorway behind them. Anyway, the news put up images of EMTs packing bloodied students into ambulances. Other students huddled behind cars or collapsed into their parents’ arms. When I went back to school the next day, they started teaching us how to avoid the runaway bullet. We were supposed to turn sideways and pray and slip into the shadows.
A bullet came along, knocked my brother off his feet; my brother was too slow now he haunts that street. All the kids are singing this Double-Dutch song with inappropriate lyrics, and the teacher leans against the building with a scowl on her face but she’s clapping her hands anyway.
One skinny little girl with blue ribbons in her braids waits for her moment, head bobbing to the rhythm of the ropes as they slap the asphalt. She’s about to jump in, but then her head tilts to the side like she’s listening to something. I can hear it too, a crackling in the air, a sound that splits everything that happened before from everything that’s about to happen.
Our eyes make contact. She starts to step toward me. Or maybe she’s just thinking about running home to hide behind those porous walls. Instead, she stops and stands perfectly still. She knows, and I know, there’s no outrunning the runaway bullet.
I remember that time the runaway bullet went inside a movie theater. Those people thought they were safe in the dark; I guess they forgot about the projector—light passing over their heads, bouncing off the screen, and lighting their faces. Shimmering eyes are an easy target for the runaway bullet. Or what about that time the guy sat in his car at the red light, sunlight glinting off the windshield? Workday done. Song playing on the radio. Just a normal day, until it wasn’t.
And goddamn don’t I know it; that runaway bullet could be anywhere. I sense it on the highway when one car cuts off another. It’s there at the grocery store when the cashier spends too long talking to the customer upfront. All those words on social media are like a chant that summons it—an incantation echoed in football stadiums and on college campuses and around playgrounds just like this one.
Bring out your dead. Count the bodies with your feet. One, two, three, four, five….
I want to step in front of the runaway bullet so that the girl with the blue ribbons doesn’t have to take the hit. She has her whole life ahead of her, and none of this shit is her fault. And I’m the adult, right? But there’s another part of me just praying to God that it doesn’t hit me. (If I’m being honest, I don’t normally believe in God.) I turn sideways and make myself real thin and try to slip into the shadows.
The runaway bullet blazes between us, sizzling the air as it tumbles past our heads.
And then it’s gone.
Little blue-ribbon girl and I look at each other and smile, and the breath I’ve been holding since watching that news report when I was a kid rushes out of me. We’re safe. For the moment, all of us are safe. The kids and their teacher, the police officer on the corner, the woman holding up a sign at the intersection, the construction workers across the street—we’re all a bunch of lucky bastards who didn’t win the runaway-bullet lottery today.
But then we hear it, the ricochet off the school building, and we all know.
It’s heading back.
Jump in. Jump out. … six, seven, eight, nine, ten…
Suddenly no one is looking at each other anymore. We’re all turned sideways and making ourselves real thin. And we whisper prayers with all our might and squeeze back into the shadows to hide.
Sam Pisciotta
Sometimes it ricochets off the side of a building or pings the hood of a car. I fucking freeze. Like Pavlov’s dog, I can’t help myself. I might catch a burst of sparks at the point of contact, but otherwise, I can’t see the goddamn thing. That’s what’s so scary about it; I never see the runaway bullet coming. I hear the whiz and the whine as it tumbles past my ear. Too late. I taste the burnt air sticking to the back of my tongue. Too late. I watch it pierce into some guy’s chest and explode from his back and the poor motherfucker is dead before he hits the ground. Too late.
A runaway bullet is like the lottery in reverse. That feeling in the pit of my stomach is not hope and expectation; the daydreams it elicits are not dreams of buying a bigger house or traveling to Iceland or secretly paying off the mortgages for friends and family. I have never stood in a line to buy a better chance of catching it. The runaway bullet is nothing like that; it’s about dread and nightmares and hiding behind the walls of our houses.
I’m walking past a schoolyard on 32nd and stop to watch some kids jumping rope. They’re swinging Double Dutch. I had a little brother and his name was Johnny; he played in the street and his smile was funny. Their hands are steady circles as they spin the ropes in crisscross arcs between them. Jump in. Jump out.
When I was a kid, I saw some older students catch the runaway bullet. It was on Channel 13 news, and it was the first time I’d ever seen a massacre. (I grew up fairly sheltered and privileged.) My parents were watching TV, and I was supposed to be doing my homework. They didn’t know I was standing in the doorway behind them. Anyway, the news put up images of EMTs packing bloodied students into ambulances. Other students huddled behind cars or collapsed into their parents’ arms. When I went back to school the next day, they started teaching us how to avoid the runaway bullet. We were supposed to turn sideways and pray and slip into the shadows.
A bullet came along, knocked my brother off his feet; my brother was too slow now he haunts that street. All the kids are singing this Double-Dutch song with inappropriate lyrics, and the teacher leans against the building with a scowl on her face but she’s clapping her hands anyway.
One skinny little girl with blue ribbons in her braids waits for her moment, head bobbing to the rhythm of the ropes as they slap the asphalt. She’s about to jump in, but then her head tilts to the side like she’s listening to something. I can hear it too, a crackling in the air, a sound that splits everything that happened before from everything that’s about to happen.
Our eyes make contact. She starts to step toward me. Or maybe she’s just thinking about running home to hide behind those porous walls. Instead, she stops and stands perfectly still. She knows, and I know, there’s no outrunning the runaway bullet.
I remember that time the runaway bullet went inside a movie theater. Those people thought they were safe in the dark; I guess they forgot about the projector—light passing over their heads, bouncing off the screen, and lighting their faces. Shimmering eyes are an easy target for the runaway bullet. Or what about that time the guy sat in his car at the red light, sunlight glinting off the windshield? Workday done. Song playing on the radio. Just a normal day, until it wasn’t.
And goddamn don’t I know it; that runaway bullet could be anywhere. I sense it on the highway when one car cuts off another. It’s there at the grocery store when the cashier spends too long talking to the customer upfront. All those words on social media are like a chant that summons it—an incantation echoed in football stadiums and on college campuses and around playgrounds just like this one.
Bring out your dead. Count the bodies with your feet. One, two, three, four, five….
I want to step in front of the runaway bullet so that the girl with the blue ribbons doesn’t have to take the hit. She has her whole life ahead of her, and none of this shit is her fault. And I’m the adult, right? But there’s another part of me just praying to God that it doesn’t hit me. (If I’m being honest, I don’t normally believe in God.) I turn sideways and make myself real thin and try to slip into the shadows.
The runaway bullet blazes between us, sizzling the air as it tumbles past our heads.
And then it’s gone.
Little blue-ribbon girl and I look at each other and smile, and the breath I’ve been holding since watching that news report when I was a kid rushes out of me. We’re safe. For the moment, all of us are safe. The kids and their teacher, the police officer on the corner, the woman holding up a sign at the intersection, the construction workers across the street—we’re all a bunch of lucky bastards who didn’t win the runaway-bullet lottery today.
But then we hear it, the ricochet off the school building, and we all know.
It’s heading back.
Jump in. Jump out. … six, seven, eight, nine, ten…
Suddenly no one is looking at each other anymore. We’re all turned sideways and making ourselves real thin. And we whisper prayers with all our might and squeeze back into the shadows to hide.
