Free Demonology by Rick Moody

she just shouldn’t have driven here will not be adequate, but there is no time for the argument,
     in any case, because now
the boy starts shooting.
He’s a teenager, and the gun is turned, thank God, away from Lily, and this boy’s ass, amid a billowing of shorts over the
     margin of baggy trousers, is pressed against the passenger window of Ellen’s Mercedes. He appears to be firing into a crowd,
     into the parking lot adjacent to the drive-thru slip, into a crowd of other teenagers, teenagers schooled in secret handshakes
     and semaphoric gesticulations and certain uniforms, teenagers now scattering, and Lily reaches back and grabs Thea by the
     hair and says,
You
are going to have to unbuckle yourself and get yourself down,
and Thea says,
But I don’t want to,
and she says,
I
don’t care what you want, just get down,
and she has to be a little rough with her daughter, as soon as Thea has sprung the belt, shoving the girls strawberry blond
     head down after the rest of her down into the footwell between backseat and front, after which she launches herself between
     the seats, over an armrest, to cover her giggling daughter with her arms,
Will one body stop a hailstorm of bullets from entering a second body? Will this water and blood and bile stop a bullet or
     is that just the stuff of movies?
She imagines that she should be composing desperate pleas,
I
love my daughter and I love my son even though he has certain difficulties and I love my husband and I only stopped here for
     juice, though I am not sure that McDonald’s even serves juice, and I think you should just let me drive on out of here and
     we can forget about the history of trouble between our two peoples,
but she doesn’t think any of these things, really, and Thea says,
Mom, you’re squishing me,
but the truth is that Lily is actually, at this moment, thinking about luggage.
Rolling suitcases are really an improvement, if you should find that you are going in and out of a number of airports in a
     short period of time
—
on a promotional junket, for example.
She happened to notice in DFW, where they filmed the luggage commercial, that the airport was so enormous that you had to
     take a train to get from one end to the other. DFW was as big as Manhattan someone told her. Or maybe that was Denver.
In airports this enormous, the rolling and pivoting mechanisms of contemporary luggage design will certainly be an improvement
     over portage-style suitcases.
Lily’s conviction is that the rolling design is so profound that it will cause further alteration inthe way Americans travel. They will change planes more often. They will go to more motels. She releases Thea for a moment,
     to peek over the margin of the rear window, in a reloading silence, just before the kids from across the parking lot begin
     to
fire back
—directly at Ellen’s Mercedes —and the sound of these bullets is like the kernels of Cineplex Odeon or Sony Theatres popcorn
     inflating in a patented
steam-popping apparatus,
or it is like a rambunctious Independence Day celebration; her similes are optimistically nonlethal, though the bullets nonetheless
     perforate the side of Ellen’s Mercedes. Lily hopes there is no actual tendency for
gas tanks to explode under these circumstances,
that the bluster of cinema is responsible for this cliche.
Mom, what’s happening?
Thea asks, and Lily says,
Please, keep your head down, okay?
And the kid, the boy, reclining against the side of the Mercedes begins to lope off toward the rear of her car, but before
     he does so he stops and looks into the backseat, through the lightly tinted glass, he eclipses all the light in the car, filling
     the window with the butt of the gun and his face and his mesh t-shirt, and his hairless chest underneath, and he looks in
     at Lily, and their eyes meet, and then bullets rain down again from across the parking lot. The sewing circle of writers will
     come back to this again and again trying to understand how