My Bullet by Bruce McAllister

My uncle was shot between the eyes by a sniper in that terrible war. The sniper aimed from a palm tree on one of the islands of the battle and sent the bullet straight to him. This happened before I was born. My uncle was the husband of my mother’s younger sister, a fragile woman everyone loved, just as they’d loved my uncle, whose name was Lucas.

When I was born, my parents named me after him. I never knew whether this was a gift or not to my aunt. Sure, it was to honor her husband, the man everyone loved, and the man she would cry about for years after the official message reached her; but didn’t it also make me a reminder, whenever we visited her and her second husband or whenever she thought of me (her older sister’s son), of the pain of losing Lucas? And it made it worse, didn’t it, that my parents took the bullet that had killed him and put it in my skull, between my eyes, when I was eight. It was a long surgery—they always are—involving two surgeons and the placement of a small plate to protect the brain should the bullet try to move. And I felt sick from the medications for weeks. But the surgery went well (it always does), and a four-inch scar, like the thinnest of smiles, pink for a few months against my skin, was the only evidence that the 6.5X50mm Ariska round—which took two years to get from the Army with the help of our family doctors—was there in my forehead. Aunt Dita could see the scar every time she saw me, or every time she saw a photograph of me that showed it. Is this really a gift to her? I kept asking myself.

I know, I know—but people did things like that in my parents’ generation. They did it all the time. It was just something you did. It was a kind of “memorializing,” an honoring, they always said. You named a child after the beloved, and you put a bullet, the point of a knife blade, a shard of glass, a small piece of machinery—whatever had caused the death of the loved one if it was a violent death—in the child. If it hadn’t been violent, you simply said prayers for the dead and for the living.

But when I was thirty, I realized I couldn’t stand it any longer. I couldn’t stand visiting my aunt (my favorite—she’d always understood me better than my parents did, as aunts and uncles often do) and seeing the sadness in her eyes when she looked at my face. She never said anything about it, and when her eyes teared up, she tried to hide it, talking about an allergy or the dryness of the Santa Ana winds or a sad movie she and her second husband had seen the previous night. But I knew. I was named Lucas, and he’d been named Lucas, and I had a mark between my eyes gentler than the one he had when he died that day thirty-five years earlier and five thousand miles away, a first lieutenant, a prize for any sniper, in a war that seemed never to end and that my father somehow came back from unscathed, and with no little guilt.

I had insurance, and it paid for most of the surgery. I had the bullet removed, and that just left even more of a scar, but I had cosmetic surgery—with skin taken from my inner thigh—to follow up. It helped a little, but the pink was still there against my dark skin. I kept the bullet in a little velvet bag my wife gave me, not knowing what else to do with it, but figuring I might know some day.

My parents were of course angry. They felt disrespected, shamed by what I’d done. They tried to make me feel that Aunt Dita would be hurt by it, but I argued: “I just don’t think she’s like that,” I insisted. “I think she’ll see what I’m doing….”

A few months after the cosmetic work healed, I saw Aunt Dita again. She was standing in their living room (they lived on the beach just south of LA), looking out at a gray, winter Pacific, the same sea where Lucas had died on on a tropical island and on a much brighter day. She and I were alone. Her husband, who was a journalist, was downstairs organizing his files. They’d never had kids, partly because she tended to depression and was always on one medication or another, but also, I think, because there’d only been one man she’d ever wanted to have kids with.

She smiled when she turned from the window, from the colorless sea beyond it, to face me, and there was something different about the smile.

“I wish you hadn’t done it, Lucas, though I know why you did. I wish we’d had a chance to talk about it first.”

She’d never spoken to me this way in my life, and my face felt as hot as a stove.

“I don’t understand, Aunt Dita,” I said finally.

She looked away.

“I wish you hadn’t taken the bullet out, Lucas,” she said finally, her eyes on on the sea again.

My mind was racing, trying to understand. “Why, Aunt Dita? It made you cry. It made you sad. I know it did.”

“Yes…. It did. But it let me remember him. That it was in your head, the same bullet, just as it had been in his, that he was dead and you were alive and so he was alive too because it was the same bullet and you had the same name….” She stopped. She was drowning in words and didn’t want me to see it.

When she began again, she said: “That is how this kind of thing is supposed to work, Lucas. That is why people do it. Just know that it never hurt me that you had it in you. The tears were never about that. I do love you, always have, and would regardless of your name and a piece of metal. But I am sorry it is no longer there. Does that make sense?”

She was crying now, little jerks of her chest, and she had turned away so that all I could see was her beautiful brown hair, which everyone loved. I nodded, even though she couldn’t see me do it. I was thinking—sad, but angry, too, at the sadness—how she was from a different generation, how I would never really understand them all, how she and my parents and everyone like them would all be gone in a few decades, taking their “memorializing” with them, and how my own kids (I had two, a boy and a girl ) would never have a bullet in their heads to make someone remember and be happy crying.

I know the doctors thought I was crazy, but I had the bullet put back in. Insurance wouldn’t cover it, so I took out most of my savings. Aunt Dita died suddenly of an undiagnosed heart problem—women often have them, I know now—so I never saw her after that surgery, though I’m sure my mother told her I’d had it.

Every once in a while I consider taking it out again, but I’d be too embarrassed, and, besides, keeping it in lets me think about the man I was named after—the one killed on a bright beach by a sniper he never saw, never had a chance to know or hate—and about the woman who found ways to love him forever, and aren’t these the kinds of things we should be thinking about in a world like ours?

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Bruce McAllister’s short stories has appeared over the years in many cience fiction, fantasy, horror and mystery magazines; “year’s best” volumes and original anthologies; and has won or been short-listed for awards like the National Endowment for the Arts, the Hugo, the Nebula, LOCUS, and Shirley Jackson. His Hugo-nominated short story “Kin” was selected to launch LeVar Burton’s new podcast, LEVAR BURTON READS. His most recent novel is the LOCUS-recommended fantasy THE VILLAGE SANG TO THE SEA: A MEMOIR OF MAGIC, and his new short story collection, STEALING GOD AND OTHER STORIES, appeared in 2022.