Martin Luther King was standing right there, but Jill couldn’t touch him.
She knew what was about to happen, she knew she had the power to save his life, but she couldn't do it. She'd only come for help with her history essay, not to change the past. Jill had watched enough Doctor Who to know that changing the past was a bad, bad thing to do. The space-time continuum of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff was easily disrupted.
Nevertheless, the crack of the bullet came as a shock. She saw Dr King, who had bent over just seconds earlier, crumple to the ground. She saw the man dressed in white race away in his blue car. Everyone on the street was screaming in chaos. The most important man in the whole of black history had just been shot. It was mayhem.
Jill had seen enough. She was disgusted with herself, but she knew what she had done was right. Riots would be erupting around the country in a short while and she needed to get out of there quickly. Without a backward glance, she placed her notepad back into her bag, crossed the road over to the payphone, stabbed the code into the keypad and wished the time to fly by quicker.
She just hoped she wasn’t late for her history class.
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Short Random Tidbits
RandomA collection of story openings, writing exercises and flash fiction. Genres range from historical fiction, sci-fi, non-fiction, fantasy and . . . everything else.
