Is this a thing that happens? While walking through East Atlanta Village on a Saturday night, my wife and I got shot by paintballs. It was a drive-by by a dark SUV, not two blocks from a cop parked at the Earl. They shot us in the back.

Back in the day, I played paintball a few times, so I already had a pretty good idea what it feels like to be hit: no big deal if you’re dressed for it. That night, we weren’t. I had a red, bruise-colored ring, beaded like it was sweating blood, where I took my hits. My wife took two to the torso, with no lasting damage beyond goopy pink splatters on both of us. No big deal, injury-wise, but what if we’d taken one to the head? The face?

“Get the license plate?” you’re asking. No, we didn’t. It took us a second to realize what had happened. We heard the shots, and the raucous verbal static of a carload of schmucks, but we figured we were hearing a can tossed out of the car, to our bad luck. Or maybe they’d run over something. Then we realized: “Hey… ow. What the hell?”

Truth be told, we couldn’t get that mad. Helplessness, I guess, diffused that. I don’t understand what makes someone think it’s okay to do that, though, so I can’t shake the lingering confusion. I mean, what the hell? Right?

Just how lousy and cowardly is it to drive around popping strangers, you know? How small a person do you have to be?