The Other JFK

“Leah?!”, asked Jacob sitting up in bed with a start and seeing his wife Leah holding the barrel of a handgun inches from his face, “What the heck are you doing with that thing?”.

“Look at you all innocent”, said his wife, wild eyed with tears running over her cheeks as she cocked the gun in her shaking fist, “But I’m not going to turn a blind eye anymore, Jacob. There are just too many coincidences to ignore”.

“Leah?!”, said Jacob, at first wondering if all this wasn’t just some crazy dream until he felt the cold edge of the barrel scrape across his forehead, “What are you talking about, honey?! This is just some craziness, that’s all it is”.

“Don’t honey me”, said Leah, “I’ve known right from the time that Kennedy came into office. He was standing there on the white house lawn delivering his inauguration speech and you were standing outside on our lawn, wearing that same blue suit and that same tie as the man I saw on the TV and he had your face and your hair. I just couldn’t believe it. You and John F Kennedy, you were identical.

Ofcourse, I laughed it all off. ‘So my husband looks like the president’, I thought. Lucky me. All my friends tell me he’s a handsome man, that JFK. But then I realized that it wasn’t just looks that you had in common. It was facial gestures, little ticks and even turns of phrase and you remember that time that Kennedy made that visit to Germany, “Ich bin ein Berliner”. That was the same time that we went on our vacation to Germany, at that convention where you had to stand up and make a presentation.

I mean even your name. Your name is the same. His name is John F Kennedy. Your name is Jacob F Keneally. There were just too many coincidences like that that I just couldn’t ignore and eventually I just had to conclude that your life; everything about you was like some sort of mirror of the President and his life.

I don’t know how to explain it. Maybe you're one of those communist spies like the Rosenbergs or some kind of a clone or something. Maybe you’re a martian. I don’t know but I know that I don’t want to be married to you anymore because you scare me”.

Jacob tried to get out of bed, angrily nudging the gun out of his face. His wife had really snapped. He’d seen her get irritable around him sometimes but nothing as dramatic as this had ever happened before, “I’ve never heard anything so crazy in all my life. Next you’ll be saying that your name is Jacqueline Kennedy”, he yelled, “Now, I am going to phone Dr Johnson and maybe he can fix you up with a good psychiatrist. ‘Cause that is what you need”.

But Leah had gone beyond the point where she was prepared to lie calmly on a couch and have some headshrinker tell her she was crazy. She knew what she knew and something had to be done about it.

Pulling the trigger and hearing the loud bang she watched in horror as a bullet hole opened up in her husband’s head and blood came spurting out. Then he fell off of the bed onto the floor of their bedroom, “My god?! What have I done?”, she said, throwing the gun on the bed.

But at least one nightmare was over, she thought and then the news came over the TV. Walter Cronkite announced to the nation that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas and, about that same time, the police broke in and started to arrest her. The shot must have been heard by the neighbours.

“Leah Harriet Oswald Keneally”, said the policeman charging her, “I arrest you for the murder of your husband”.