Number One with a Bullet

Brolin One-Liner: “A gun. How many stories of fact and fiction are based on its power to change the course of human events? Yet the greatest storyteller ever, Shakespeare seemed to do fine without it.”

Yeah, I guess he did fine, in the greatest-English-author-of-poetry-tragedy-comedy-and-history-of-all-time way. He may be the most well celebrated author of all time but he didn’t even have a gun.

The story begins on a Valentine ’s Day with Sharon working hard on her lunch break. She is the manager of a real estate office and is focused on her career. The narrator is her secretary and best friend and NOTHING MORE. We get a slow pan across Sharon’s desk and we see a couple pictures of her and her husband and like twenty pictures with her secretary. Certainly we shouldn’t read too much into the secretary who would do ANYTHING for her boss.

It’s then that her secretary comes in and playfully chides her about working too hard and that she should be at the Valentine’s party (I thought only elementary schools had these). Turns out, Sharon is ALSO celebrating her anniversary (which is on Valentine’s Day) with her very heterosexual husband today. She has bought them tickets to Paris to enjoy a honeymoon they haven’t been able to go on because things were going so well for them.

After exchanging meaningful glances between the secretary and her, Sharon drives home to totally be straight for a while with her husband on Valentine’s Day (which is also their anniversary). When Sharon arrives at her house there is a cop car in her driveway. She goes inside and calls out for her husband twice but receives no answer. Sharon notices her husband’s clothes leading up the stairs. Sharon’s not even a little bit fazed that she might have just walked into the middle of a crime scene.

[He never puts his dirty evidence in the hamper]

She goes upstairs and finds more clothing strewn about recklessly, but some of it is women’s clothes. It was never established before this point but her husband, John, is a cop. So without this knowledge one logically assumes that a cop car outside the house would be related to some crime. But, nope! The husband, Captain Oblivious, is examining the body of evidence on a female deputy if you know what I mean. After yelling his name a third time, at the top of the stairs, twenty feet from the bedroom, AT THE TOP OF HER LUNGS, John finally thinks he’s heard something. Now the hubris of this guy is insane. This guy is cheating on his wife. In the middle of the day. On Valentine’s Day. Which is also their anniversary. Damn.

John goes to open the door but Sharon is already in the room. She yells for them to leave, but John thinks he can talk his way out of this. Damn. Sharon grabs John’s gun from the nightstand and points it at him. The female cop pulls her gun and points it at Sharon. This gives John the opportunity to start a dramatic struggle for the gun Sharon is holding. In the commotion Sharon is shot and killed by John. There’s never any information regarding the ensuing trial, cover-up and obvious suicide by shooting oneself in the gut and bleeding out theory, but John gets away with murder. Until a mysterious stranger shows up with a burly winter coat.

[oh and a gun…I guess]

John is mowing his back lawn, and is oblivious to Sharon’s secretary standing at his gate with a gun. She fires once at John but misses and hits an innocent tree. Fellow Blog Belief readers I must ask you, when will the killing end? The secretary slinks away, shamefaced that she had only brought one bullet. She now has to decide whether she should go back to Sears and buy the other bullet or just call it even. I mean, she did shoot his tree.

        Turns out she does call it a day, a week, and two years later before we rejoin the story and John. He is now married to the woman he cheated on Sharon with and living it up gardening. His new wife asks him to cut down the old tree because it reminds her of Sharon. So he goes to cut down the tree on the fourteenth of February. That’s right. Valentine’s Day (which is also his and his late wife’s anniversary). The second he puts the chainsaw into the tree though, John falls over dead. Turns out his saw, struck the bullet the secretary had shot and sent it into his heart.

[Take that you stupid tree!]

Brolin One Liner: “Maybe this was simply a fable and our writing staff is guilty of firing blanks.”

Dale’s Comment: He should’ve been wearing eye protection

Casey: That probably wouldn’t have stopped the bullet.

Dale: Still, if he hadn’t hit the bullet, he still could’ve been blinded. Honestly though, without further ballistics testing its hard to say it wasn’t a second shooter. Does the bullet show two years worth of weathering? We don’t know.

Casey: A second shooter? From the grassy knoll?

Dale: Exactly. Fact.

Casey: Yeah, Fact.

Fact or Fiction: Fact