The Bullet

Introduction:

  School's back (boo!), but I'm homeschooled (yeah!), so that means that I get awesome assignments like this.  So when we decided to study Benjamin Franklin we found out that he taught himself to write by taking poems and turning them into short stories and then taking short stories and turning them into poems.  Then he wrote a "Autobiography" but that's a different story.  So that was my assignment.  Turn a poem into a story.  So here's a link to the poem "Richard Cory": http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174248
And here's the story, so you can compare.

  The Story:

 

In hindsight I should have seen it coming.  In hindsight it should’ve been obvious.  Though I never really paid attention.  I never really cared in the first place.  I was jealous of him.  Just like everyone else.  My name is Steven Cory.

All my life I’ve been jealous of my older brother, Richard.  It seemed Richard got everything.  He was handsome, tall, and he had the undying love of our parents.  I didn’t have any of that.  I didn’t have anything.  As we grew Richard continued to receive love from our parents.  I was ignored.  Then our parent died.  Of old age.  Thank God they weren’t murdered.  Richard inherited the entire company and the house from them.  I didn’t get a cent.  I had to live in the village streets, while Richard got to live in the house on the hill.

I was mad.  Mad is an understatement.  I was furious!  Furious at my parents, furious at the world, but most importantly furious at him.  Richard.  At any one point, did he ever think of me?  No!  He didn’t!  Did he ever say, “Times are tough, why don’t you live with me Steven?”  The least he could’ve done was give me a job at his big, beautiful company.  But he never did that, did he?

I wasn’t alone though.  Almost everyone in town hated him.  They hated the way he lived in his house on the hill.  Lording above them.  They hated his money, and they hated the way he sauntered into town and causally said “Good Morning.”  Everyone wished they had his education, his luck, his money.  But they couldn’t.  So everyone ignored him.  If they couldn’t be him, they would pretend he didn’t exist.  Richard didn’t have a wife, he didn’t have any friends, but he didn’t care.  He was rich.

In hindsight we were wrong.  We were wrong in hating him.  We were wrong in shaming him, but it’s not our fault.  How could we have known what was going to happen.  How could we have known what he was going through, what he was about to do?  I didn’t know.  One summer night, we were drinking in the local tavern.  Then we heard a BANG!!!  A shot rang out from the top of the hill.  We ran there.  For once in our lives caring about what had happened to Richard, but it was too late.  We found him in a pool of blood in his library.