Anton Checkhov was a Russian writer who is notable for the principle “One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.” popularly called Checkhov’s Gun (Burn Notice creator Matt Nix produced a hilarious, meta-referential short film in his earlier days titled Chekhov’s Gun) He was very prolific and among his many works are a number of awesome short stories. My favorite that I came across is a short called The Orator. I wrote this short inspired by The Orator.