Description
I wrote this story in 2006 for entry into a short fiction contest by the BUFFALO NEWS. The NEWS ran several of these annual contests in the late 2000s; they would provide a prompt for writers (always dealing with some Buffalo-area location or bit of historical lore) and a word-count target, and then they would print the first and second place winners in the paper. The prompt for this particular year was that you had to write about the assassination of President William McKinley (which happened in Buffalo) from the standpoint of a man named Ernest and a woman named Hilda, who witnessed it. This story is my take on that prompt. I had forgotten this tale for a while, but the sudden recent resurgence in interest in President McKinley (because of a mountain in Alaska that bore his name for a time) reminded me of this story, and looking it over again, I remember that I am genuinely quite fond of how this one turned out. I’ve always been something of a Presidential history-and-trivia geek, and I managed to get quite a bit of that into this story. Oh, and this story won first prize, so there’s that.
Twelve Presidents (complete)
