The day it happened.. it was about 20 years ago. We were both little kids. None of us had common sense. We loved it.
There was this one time when something interesting happened. We had been hitting bullets with a hammer that day in the corner of the barn, but we saved the last for the best spot. A rusty old safe with no door in the backyard. We decided one of us would hit the bullet from the side and we’d listen to the bullet bounce around inside.
Silly of us.
After playing rock-paper-scissors it was decided that Dan would do the honors. An he did, valiantly.
“You ready?”, he asked as I stood behind the safe.
“Just do it!”, I yelled.
Dan half blindly hit the bullet straight on, but we heard nothing. We both rushed to the opening and saw the bullet casing. It was empty.
“Where did it go?”
“I don’t know”
We looked for the bullet until dark that day but we never found it. Some days we would go back and look for it, in the safe, in the dirt, in the tree nearby.
Last year when… well, you know. We were at the annual family reunion and we decided we’d go see if the safe was still there. It was, to our surprise. But here’s when it gets weird.
We had a few beers by the tree near the old safe. We talked about our jobs, about our parents, about the old days in the sun.
“Hey what do you think happened to that bullet man?”, he asked me.
“It probably just flew off somewhere”.
“Yeah…”, he stood silent for a minute, and then walked to the safe. He kneeled in front of it, examined it, and turned back to say something when boom!
Out of freaking nowhere, I swear. The sound of a gunshot and just literally from thin air two copies of Dan just lied there on the floor with a bullet hole in their heads.
“What the fuck?”, I screamed.
Dan stood up, his pale faced wore an open jaw of surprise.
“What the fuck is this?”, he asked, almost whispered.
To both of his sides, two men, I dare say two Dans. Two exact copies of him lay there, dead. I shit you not, I pooped my pants a little.
We called the cops, they called the doctors, they called some scientists and they called some other doctors. No one knew what the hell happened.
He hasn’t been right since that day. But he’s my brother you know? So, I just dealt with it. Helped him with it. I find him out there sometimes, just staring at the safe. God only knows what he’s thinking.