The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet

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The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet is a novella by Stephen King first published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1984 and collected in the 1985 anthology Skeleton Crew.

Written from the perspective of an editor retelling a past encounter with an insane but gifted writer, The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet concerns how the writer's insanity ended up afflicting him.

The protagonist employs the metaphor of insanity as a "flexible bullet" fired into a room, hitting those inside indiscriminantly. The editor, an alcoholic, is struck by this "bullet" and begins to believe in his writer's manifestation of madness: "Fornits" - extremely tiny creatures who live inside their typewriters and help inspire them to write with their magical fornit dust, but are in perpetual peril from all sorts of unlikely sources. The men eventually begin to see others as threats to their Fornits, and go to disturbing lengths to protect them.