Skip to contentWe love awesome short stories, especially when there are special twist endings in them. That is especially true when the story also involves people with unique personalities. We came across these three stories so great that we knew we must share them. They are on our all-time favorites list.
Here we go with our first story.
A heart surgeon took his car to his local garage for a regular service, where he usually exchanged a little friendly banter with the owner, a very skilled but not especially wealthy mechanic.
“So tell me,” says the mechanic, “I’ve been wondering about what we both do for a living and how much more you get paid than me…”
“Yes?” says the surgeon.
“Well look at this,” says the mechanic, as he worked on a big complicated BMW engine, “I check how it’s running, open it up, fix the valves, and put it all back together so it works good as new. We basically do the same job, don’t we? And yet you are paid ten times what I am – how do you explain that?”
The surgeon thought for a moment, and smiling gently, replied quietly to the mechanic,
“Try it with the engine running.”
A very subtle but significant difference between perception and reality in this story, no?
This is a true story about which I recently read.
In 2003, Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach, director of the National Cancer Institute (USA) announced his organization’s goal of “eliminating suffering and death” caused by cancer by 2015.
The United States of America has a standing committee as part of the United States Senate called “United States Senate Committee on Appropriations” that moderates the Senate spending on issues such as defense, energy, and science among many others. In one of the appropriations hearings, Dr. von Eschenbach got into a bargaining session on funding matters with Senator Arlen Specter, who was then a Republican from Penn, about the amount of money his organization would need to advance the cure of cancer.
“I asked you what it would take to move that date to 2010,” Mr. Specter asked.
“We have proposed a budget that would support those initiatives that would amount to approximately $600 million a year,” Dr. von Eschenbach answered.
“Six hundred million a year?” Mr. Specter asked. “And you can move the date from 2015 to 2010?”
“Yes, Sir,” Mr. von Eschenbach said.
—
Mr. Specter died of cancer in 2012.
Our final story was another true one from Associated Press, Reported by Kurt Westervelt.
On March 23, 1994, the medical examiner viewed the body of Ronald Opus and concluded that he died from a shotgun wound to the head.
Mr. Opus had jumped from the top of a ten-story building intending to commit suicide. He left a note to the effect indicating his despondency.
As he fell past the ninth floor his life was interrupted by a shotgun blast passing through a window, which killed him instantly.
Neither the shooter nor the deceased was aware that a safety net had been installed just below the eighth-floor level to protect some building workers and that Ronald Opus would not have been able to complete his suicide the way he had planned.
“Ordinarily,” Dr. Mills continued, “A person, who sets out to commit suicide and ultimately succeeds, even though the mechanism might not be what he intended, is still defined as committing suicide.”
That Mr. Opus was shot on the way to certain death, but probably would not have been successful because the safety net, caused the medical examiner to feel that he had a homicide on his hands.
The room on the ninth floor, where the shotgun blast emanated, was occupied by an elderly man and his wife. They were arguing vigorously and he was threatening her with a shotgun.
The man was so upset that when he pulled the trigger he completely missed his wife and the bullets went through the window striking Mr. Opus.
When one intends to kill subject “A” but kills subject “B” in the attempt, one is guilty of the murder of subject “B”.
When confronted with the murder charge the old man and his wife were both adamant and both said that they thought the shotgun was unloaded.
The old man said it was a long-standing habit to threaten his wife with the unloaded shotgun. He had no intention to murder her. Therefore the killing of Mr. Opus appeared to be an accident; that is if the gun had been accidentally loaded.
The continuing investigation turned up a witness who saw the old couple’s son loading the shotgun about six weeks prior to the fatal accident.
It transpired that the old lady had cut off her son’s financial support and the son, knowing the propensity of his father to use the shotgun threateningly, loaded the gun with the expectation that his father would shoot his mother.
Since the loader of the gun was aware of this, he was guilty of the murder even though he didn’t actually pull the trigger.
The case now becomes one of murder on the part of the son for the death of Ronald Opus.
Now comes the exquisite twist.
Further investigation revealed that the son was, in fact, Ronald Opus.
He had become increasingly despondent over the failure of his attempt to engineer his mother’s murder. This led him to jump off the ten-story building on March 23rd, only to be killed by a shotgun blast passing through the ninth-story window.
The son had actually murdered himself, so the medical examiner closed the case as a suicide.
A 50- something-year-old white woman arrived at her seat on a crowded flight and immediately didn’t want the seat. The seat was next to a black man. Disgusted, the woman immediately summoned the flight attendant and demanded a new seat. The woman said, “I cannot sit here next to this black man.” The flight attendant said, “Let me see if I can find another seat.” After checking, the flight attendant returned and stated “Ma’am, there are no more seats in economy, but I will check with the captain and see if there is something in first class.
” About 10 minutes went by and the flight attendant returned and stated “The captain has confirmed that there are no more seats in economy, but there is one in first class. It is our company policy to never move a person from economy to first class, but being that it would be some sort of scandal to force a person to sit next to an UNPLEASANT person, the captain agreed to make the switch to first class.”
Before the woman could say anything, the attendant gestured to the black man and said, “Therefore sir, if you would so kindly retrieve your personal items, we would like to move you to the comfort of first class as the captain doesn’t want you to sit next to an unpleasant person.”