SmackDown: Back to Our Roots

Round 2: Following Orders - @Wolfwhistle

Following Orders

by Wolfwhistle

The sky is an autumn azure. So is Jackie's dress. The rich fabric slinks down her navel, and ripples past her knees and down to the floor of the car. Like a glistening waterfall, it flows around her calves and heels. Her dress rustles as the car moves through the cheering crowds and confetti. The motorcade snakes lazily through the heat and packed streets. Police motorcycles and men in dark suits and sunglasses patrol alongside them. She waves to the crowd with regal white gloves.

John F Kennedy sits alongside her. He has a Presidential smile held fast to his face. In front of them, the Texan Governor and his wife are also going through the motions. Kennedy catches the gaze of his wife. Her eyes are blue, sparkling, like the dress she is wearing. Unable to help himself, a Genuine smile spreads across his face. It will be the last Genuine smile he makes in his life, but he does not know that, so don't tell him. It's not your job.

The motorcade turns into Main St.

The procession of regal, open-aired black cars parades down it. The Dallas air is full of cheers, confetti, and car engines. There is probably a baby crying, and children fighting for a good view. Perhaps an older brother has his sibling in a headlock, when three loud shots sound from a high vantage point.

Take a moment to observe the bullets as they, well, bullet through the air toward the car, and Kennedy's last Genuine smile.

Now, consider a different situation: if Jackie were wearing a pink coat and dress, with matching circular hat, the bullets would find their intended marks inside Kennedy and Texan Governor, Connally, and history would simply stagger along until it ends with Trump, and plastic pollution, and you probably can fill in the rest (the rest being a slip of the toupee, a Russian invasion, and a scientific study linking fake tan to both Parkinson's, Dementia, and a marked drop in IQ. In case you were wondering, yes, the study was dismissed as Fake News).

However, Jackie is not wearing pink. She's clothed in blue. A delightful, shimmering, freeing blue that probably isn't meant for Presidential motorcades. But her daughter Caroline will be watching on television. She wanted to see her mother in blue. Such requests, Jackie cannot refuse her daughter, whose birthday is in six days. The dress moves in the chilly breeze.

In this situation, the marksman is slightly inconvenienced. He has had Kennedy in his crosshairs for over a minute now. Watching the car draw slowly closer to his position. He breathes slowly out. The azure fabric blinks in his eyes, like a mirror directing sunlight. The marksman recoils in pain (only briefly, as he is a professional, after all). The bullets leave his

rifle almost identically. Ex-Marine Harvey Oswald takes his job seriously. Even though he fires an infinitesimal millisecond early, the barrel doesn't even wobble.

Three loud rifle shots shock the older brother into releasing his sibling. They have missed the act.

Jackie Kennedy's dress floods with crimson. Connally's skull splatters the President with skull and brain. A third bullet clips the car, and history doesn't so much stagger towards the End, so much as glance at the edge of a cliff, and start sprinting.

Kennedy paces the lino floor outside Trauma Room One. Disinfectant cloys his nostrils and settles on the back of his neck. Servicemen stake out the corridors. For all the power he has in America, they will not let him enter. Jackie's dress, so dreadfully red, was cut off with shears as they wheeled her off the ambulance. A door slams in the distance. He flinches. He has seen men dying in the Navy, and they look much, much too similar to Jackie in his memory. His own shirt is white again. There is always a change of clothes for the President.