8/30/12

She was there…
by Sergio “ente per ente” PALUMBO,
edited by Michele DUTCHER


She was there…

Her beautiful blue eyes hovered before him. The woman, 30-years-old, sat in the garden, looking at a bulky hairless man nearby.

Frank had begun to like her smile, the long chestnut hair that flowed over two thin shoulders and her pale face. After one week, the young, fair-haired man could easily figure out what she was thinking, even her worries.

She was there…

Well dressed, he continued walking across Piazza della Riforma, downtown Lugano, Switzerland. Every time Frank saw her beauty he doubted she was real, getting confused at times. Perhaps she was only an apparition of loveliness.

Whenever the man wasn’t able to visualize her, he put his fingers on the piece of cloth that he always carried with him, and her image would turn crystal clear again.

She was there…

Frank had been capable of seeing the woman in many different places, at different times. She was always with the same tall man, and he appeared to never leave her alone. He tried to see some shop signs along the street that matched the images constantly flowing in his mind, while looking at the wondrous Lake Ceresio in the distance as a reference point. Once he thought he had gone in the right direction, then understood his mistake,changing his route accordingly.

Eventually, the man discovered her. She was sitting at a table on a tavern’s veranda, in Piazza Cioccaro. She wore blue jeans and a sweater while the same man was dressed in brown (a style common for a bodyguard) and stood nearby.

They couldn’t even imagine, they had no idea.

Frank came closer, drew his ray gun, took aim at the man and fired, killing him. Then he shot the woman as well. There were no mistakes, the second target fell to the ground, while some customers around started crying, running away.

Frank was a killer, working for the mafia. Nobody would have guessed it by seeing him at first glance, and this had always helped him in his profession.

The woman was a valuable witness for the State, scheduled to testify against a famous gangster. She was in hiding through the WITSEC (foreign Witness Security Program), keeping safe until the trial start. So his boss was forced to get rid of her in a hurry.

Being clairvoyant had always proved useful to Frank. Thanks to his innate psychic powers, his abilities were perfect for finding individuals who were in hiding and then assassinating them. While many killers paid corrupt accomplices to find out where their objectives lived in secrecy, he only needed something that had once belonged to whoever he was looking for. The piece of the target’s clothing Frank had been provided with had helped him in viewing her whereabouts, linking his mind to hers, one step at a time.

Once the job was done, the man would continue to have some weird recollections coming from the memories he had shared when touching his target’s clothing. Such a sensation could really become exhausting.

However, for the enormous amount of money they had paid him -- the killer told himself, while running away -- he could easily live with those irksome memories, certainly…


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I'm an Italian public servant who graduated from Law School working in the public

real estate branch. I've published a Fantasy RolePlaying illustrated Manual,

WarBlades, of more than 400 pages.Some of my works and short- stories have been published on American Aphelion Webzine, WeirdYear Webzine, YesterYearFiction, AnotheRealm Magazine, Alien Skin Magazine, on Orion’s Child Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine, Farther Stars Than These, on Digital Dragon Magazine, on Kalkion Science Fiction and Fantasy Web Magazine, on Quantum Muse, Surprising Stories, on Australian Antipodean SF, on British Schlock!Webzine on Australian SQ Mag, and will appear soon, in print, inside an American Horror Anthology, title: Now I Lay Me Down To Reap...by Sirens Call Publications, inside an American Fantasy Anthology for shorts-stories by Chamberton publishing and inside an American Anthology of Historical/Fantasy shorts-stories by the same publisher, too.” I am also a scale modeler who likes mostly Science Fiction and Real Space models, some of my little Dioramas has been shown also on some Italian (scale model) magazines like Soldatini, Model Time, TuttoSoldatini and online on American site StarShipModeler, MechaModelComp, on British SFM: UK site and Italian SMF. My Sci-Fi/fantasy/Horror short- stories in Italian have been published on Alpha Aleph, Algenib, Oltre il Futuro, SogniHorror, La Zona Morta, edizioni Lo Scudo, etc.”