"The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet" is a novella by American writer Stephen King, first published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1984 and collected in King's 1985 collection Skeleton Crew. The title is in reference to the narrator's belief that insanity is a sort of "flexible bullet": it will eventually kill, but how long this process takes, and how much damage the bullet does before the victim finally dies, are impossible to predict. Since the publication of this story, King has occasionally used the term "flexible bullet" to describe insanity, in reference to this story.