Story Cubes 14: Shooting (fiction)

I was his guardian now, after the shooting. We would talk about anything, little Thaddeus and I, while we sat on the living room rug, in the dark, with a flashlight. Thaddeus thought of it as a sort of magic wand. We would sometimes make shadows on the wall, but most often he would draw with the beam, and I would try to guess what he depicted.

That night, one of them was a swooping U shape -- a horseshoe? A rainbow? No, a magnet he said. That led to a discussion of electromagnetism. He wondered if it would be possible to build an electromagnetic weapon, a gun that would shoot a beam, like a tiny lightning bolt, through a keyhole.

"Maybe," I said. "But why would you want to do that?"

"To stun people. Not kill them."

"And why would you want to do that?"

"So nobody would ever need bullets again."

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(The bold-faced words are interpreted from the images on Rory's Story Cubes)