Free My Mother-in-Law Drinks by Anthony Shugaar, Diego De Silva

wind out of him. Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo clenched his teeth and squeezed his eyes shut in a deforming grimace and then curled up in a fetal position, as if to gather the pain into the exact center of his body, thereby suffocating it.
    Matteo the deli counterman stood staring at the pistol on the floor as if he’d never seen anything remotely like it in his life. Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo gathered his strength and threw a punch in Matrix’s general direction, but Matrix dodged it easily, and taking advantage of that further loss of balance he climbed onto the engineer’s back, wrapping his legs around him to keep him from reaching the gun. Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo found himself crushed to the floor with Matrix riding him like a horse, whereupon he slammed both his hands to the ground in an attempt to buck off his jockey: a move that Matrix immediately countered by glueing his torso to his back in order to force him down with every ounce of his weight. It was as if the two were miming intercourse, with the further aggravating factor of the attempted ear bite on the part of the one on top.
    Now the situation had been grotesquely reversed. A prisoner who’d been deprived of the use of his arms riding on the back of the man who’d handcuffed him in the first place.
    As for us three useless bystanders: Matteo the deli counterman went on staring at the pistol as if it were some sort of alien organism that had infected his psychomotor software; I was tempted to come to Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo’s defense, but my ignorance of his motives kept pushing back against that impulse; the old woman had regained her voice, and she had emerged from her hiding place behind my back and was now shouting at the top of her lungs, “Police! For the love of God, call the police!” as she watched the fight on the television monitors instead of live in front of her (a circumstance that would later give me food for thought about people’s tendency to look to screens for a confirmation of reality).
    Meanwhile two female cashiers had shown up, one klutzier than the other, clutching each other by the arms as they took turns stammering “
Maronna mia
” instead of moving their asses and calling the police before we had time to commemorate the day.
    At the far end of the aisle, I got a confused glimpse of two or three shoppers (one of whom must have been the aforementioned “Franco”) who had shown up on set and were watching the writhing bodies struggle from a safe distance and who were clearly as indecisive and frightened as we were (except they had the advantage of having just shown up and thus being exempt from any obligation to take action).
    Suddenly one of the cashiers took off running for the exit. Her coworker dashed after her, I suppose in imitation. To my inexpressible relief, the old woman went after them.
    Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo covered his ears with both hands to protect them from Matrix’s gnashing teeth, as his ponytailed opponent went on snarling and drooling on his head like a rabid dog trying to clamp its jaws shut on anything within reach. Every so often he’d lift a foot and drive his ankle into the engineer’s belly.
    I couldn’t take much more of just standing there and doing nothing, and I was about to leap into the fray when Matrix raised his head and called out to Matteo the deli counterman:
    â€œHey you! Get the gun!”
    The counterman responded with the same disconcerted expression that the guys sitting in the back row in school (generally tall, incredibly skinny, with long bangs and turtleneck sweaters) used to put on whenever the teacher yanked them out of their anonymity and called on them by their last names, whereupon they, abruptly rejoining the scholastic community, would point to themselves inquiringly.
    They were incredible, those guys. In practical terms, they attended school incognito, camouflaging themselves with whatever organic