Frame 313 by Jack Bumby
I never sell the footage anymore. At first, I sold it to anyone willing to pay—it was of national and historical importance, wasn’t it? But after the dream, I stopped altogether.
I stood in Times Square. There were screens around me, the size of trolley cars. They were a far cry from the Coca-Cola advertisements I’d seen on my last trip to the city. An advertisement had just come to an end. It had shown a film in which a muscular American gunned down armies of foreign enemies in increasingly violent ways. Despite the gore on display, the crowd had paid it no heed.
The screen went black for half a second, before lighting up again with my footage. The motorcade turned onto Elm. Smiles. Cheers. A babushka and a man with an umbrella. The first familiar shot rang out and the screen froze on the appalling results of the final bullet. Giant letters appeared over the image: SEE THE PRESIDENT’S HEAD EXPLODE.
Around me, people cheered as the Square burned. Somewhere, a few streets away, someone was screaming a tortured version of the national anthem. The President was dead, and he’d taken us all to hell with him.
Jack is a writer living and working in Greater Manchester. He writes whenever he can and recently earned a distinction after completing his MA in Creative Writing. Short stories are his bread and butter, and he likes to write about the people and places around him in the North West. He recently finished work on his first novella.
Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash
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