F. P. Dorchak

Speculative Fiction Author

Jacqueline Lee (Bouvier) Kennedy Onassis

Pink Gloves

by

Red. Black. Pink. (Walt Cisco, Dallas Morning News [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)
Red. Black. Pink. (Walt Cisco, Dallas Morning News [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)
“She turns.

Murder screams through her head.

It’s not her angst-ridden, desperate face that JFK and the public sees, but the calm, placid face of Jackie Kennedy.

Pleasantly smiling face.

Calmly twisting wave of a white-gloved hand. Hair…hat?

Pink.

Pink, pink, pink…outfit?

A kind of “coatdress”—pink…pink hat.

Red roses.

Red.

Pretty, red, thorny.

Pink.

She can still feel it, the threat—it wasn’t supposed to be this way—but it’s still there—she can feel it like an oncoming

(Blaaack…black, black….)

shockwave that has already happened.

Unstoppable.

Pink, red, thorny, black.

Please, Mister President, you have to get down!

Too late, it’s too late. Hot

(red)

splatters her pink face, pink body, pink life…not once, but twice…

Pink, pink, pink…

…husband bowls over…collapses into her…before a black

(black black black…)

terror drowns out her soul—”

—Psychic, Wailing Loon, 2014

The above comes from my newest novel, Psychic, about a hotline psychic who becomes embroiled in a government conspiracy that doesn’t involve JFK as you might think it would.

But, an interesting thing happened on the way to releasing this book.

I’d researched and researched my scenes, including this one. I knew that Jackie wore a pink coatdress and white gloves. Knew it. Yet, when I had my proofreader, Mandy, give me her notes, she’d pointed out that I’d written pink gloves.

Pink gloves?!

No way!

PINK?!

Very embarrassing.

But I went back in there, and sure enough, I’d written “pink…pink gloves.”

I don’t remember ever writing that, yet there it was. Anyone who knows anything about that day knows Jackie wore a pink dress with white gloves.

Writing mechanics and proofreading aside…this highlights something this novel trucks heavily in: alternate realities. It appears a very real alternate reality had (once again) made its way into my reality. Some alternate “Frank” (or, perhaps, Victor Black?) had weaseled into my world and changed that word to “pink.” I had no memory of that—at all—and it actually gave me cause for pause. That particular error just really made me think, gee, where the hell had that come from!

So, perhaps along the lines of my ring and grape episodes, this little morsel had seemingly come out of nowhere. Why? Of all the comments Mandy had given me, this one item really threw me for a loop….

Am I making a mountain out of a molehill?

Had I really made that error?

Had there really been one shot or two?

Guess we’ll never really know.

Related articles