It was chaos.
A skillet of boiling tomatoes popped and voicelessly cried out for a stir as the otherwise silent room built into a futher tension. The kitchen bench, now scattered with flour and the shards of broken crockery, began to run slick with olive oil as the punctured tin leaked freely and spread out on to the floor below. In a whirlwind of movement thirty seconds of gunfire had run ragged through the small brick townhouse and the pot marks of bullets that littered the dining-room wall would prove to difficult to plaster over later.
A man, pained of breath, crouched down beside the upended dressing cabinet he had just pushed into the corridor and then eyed-off the grandfather clock, wondering if could be a further barricade.
A hot welt of pain let itself be known in his side, wetting his shirt and slowly draining away the adrenalin that was keeping him alive. He had not expected a shoot-out at his grandmother’s. A knife fight? Maybe, but anything fatial was something that the Bareillies were normally more tactful around whenever brunch was involved.
‘Would you take the recycling out when you leave,’ Nino yelled to kitchen and he hoped his would-be assassin no longer lurked, ‘feel free to take your time though, I have all afternoon.’
Holding a shoe out into the corridor, Nino lurched backward as several shots from a machine-gun knocked the boot from his hand and sent it cartwheeling across the tiled floor. ‘Damn,’ he spat to himself annoyed that he had just lost a good shoe.
‘You picked the wrong footwear for a gun-fight, little cockroach,’ the Bareilli assassin yelled from his vantage somewhere in the kitchen, ‘time is up for you; lay down before I have to smoke you out.’
Things had happened quickly, in the spae of one moment this pleasant Sunday had gone terribly wrong and the world had taken on a dizzy blur as the panic that had saved Nino’s life had also made him throw a gun at his attacker instead of shooting it.
A photo album shield, a tea pot connecting with a jaw, a streak of hot white pain growing in Nino’s side. He was unsure of what had fully happened in the skirmish but deep down he knew that he would be apologising to his Nonna if he managed to survive.
‘You’re in my house, Bareilli! I trust you wiped your feet before tracking filth into the kitchen.’ Inching toward the cupboard, Nino went in search of something he could use as a blunt object.
Distract the gunman, he was in the pantry, Nino was sure of it. All he needed to do was push through the false door in the bathroom and hope that he had enough time to surprise his assailant with a club to the head.
‘You owe us money, little one. We’re taking the payment today.’
One jump, that’s all it was. One short jump across the corridor into the bathroom and he’d have his ambush. Ripping the metal pole from coat rack in his grandmother’s spare bedroom, Nino eyed the open door across a hallway that now looked all too wide.
‘I tell you friend, there are many things–’ he yelled, hoping to distract his assailant’s focus.
Leaping across the corridor with a tumult of energy Nino had never felt so fully uncoiled as time slowed for the second time in this busy afternoon. Each bullet hung in the air as if were a line that underlined finality, each one of Nino’s fading breaths held the resonance of a carillon and the protentional to be his last. With clarity he struggled to internalise, Nino had seen the gunman perched behind the counter and not in the cover of the pantry as he had hoped. Waves of fear rippled up the young man’s neck as his only chance of surprise was now impossible.
Landing in a heap, Nino cried out in pain as he had been tagged again, a small stream of blood running from a new hole in his ankle; resigned to dying in his nonna’s bathroom, he slowly gave in to his waning energy and slumped against the bath.
‘You can leave, you still have the chance,’ he called, knowing that time was running thin.
‘I’ll leave with your li—’
An explosion erupted into the silent air and shook a portion of plaster from the roof above Nino.
Some sudden concussion of force had knocked the Bareilli from his feet and barrelled him into a cupboard of good silverware and teacups, both seldom used but often dusted.
The would-be assassin had as yet not managed to process his pellet-riddled end, as the memories of the butt of a shotgun and the smiling face of a grandmother had not yet come into focus before the trigger was pulled.
‘You didn’t wipe your feet child,’ nonna rasped, cold clocking the home invader square in his jaw and knocking him into a cupboard. Looking at the stunned creature trying to process what had happen the octogenarian smiled falsely and let two barrels of detachment make short work of the man’s ribcage.
‘Every one of you half grown weeds have no sense of politeness these days, all thorns without a stem! You think not with your brain but the space below your stomach,’ spitting on the ground with departing vitriol, nonna dropped the rifle onto the bench and marched over to her stovetop, stirring the broiling sauce and hoping that it could be saved. Seeing it not to be burnt and with a slow return to her elderly frailty, the kind eyed nonna tapped her wooden spoon upon the edge of the iron skillet and turned to her bullet riddled kitchen.
‘Nino! Go wash up your friend before lunch, he’s fallen over.’
J.McCray
2021
Sunday Short Stories 