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// Just Want My Sandwich - Nobody Move 
// Story: Written Off 
// by Georg 
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All she wanted to do this afternoon was settle down in a window seat at the sandwich shop and read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s latest book. She needed a break from Wollstonecraft, because if she were to read another FemLit book this week, she would have to write a newspaper editorial just to get it all out of her system.

The noise of the store door slamming open stunned her in the middle of deciding between olives or green peppers for her sub sandwich, and for a moment, her mind could not make sense of the shouted words.

“Nobody move!”

Moving was impossible anyway. Her muscles had frozen in place when she caught sight of the gun, a huge lump of black metal much like the massive pistol her father had showed her at the gun shop.

As the young man continued to shout and wave his gun around, some small portion of her frightened mind could not help but draw a contrast between the oppressed minority children who had always been portrayed in her college classes against the muscular young man with the shiny gold chain and wide, dark eyes. Her paralyzed terror broke as he grabbed her purse and backhanded her when she did not give it up fast enough.

“Down, bitch! Everybody, put your wallets in here! Now! Move it!”

He jabbed the open purse at the other customers waiting in line, but swung his gun to point at the terrified cashier. She was the daughter of the owner, and always had a pleasant smile when tipped, but she was completely immobile now, frozen while staring at the gun and the man holding it.

“Gimmie the fucking cash in the register or I’ll blow your brains out!”

The sharp tang of metal and blood filled her mouth. This was not the way it was supposed to go. She had given up her purse. He was supposed to go away now, not kill the poor cashier for not moving fast enough.

Her right hand fumbled down to her beltline as she hooked her fingernails under the flap of what looked like a fat cell phone holder or music player attached to her belt. With a snap, the Sneaky Pete holster flap gave way and practiced muscles in her hand dipped inside. It was warm from her body heat and seemed so small compared to the huge pistol in his hand, but days worth of practice and boxes of ammunition had given her the muscle memory which still remained even though her mind was unable to form a coherent thought.

She brought it up and clenched it in a two-handed grip the way her father had trained her.

The first shot was a surprise to the both of them. He did not seem to be hit as he turned ever so slowly, gun in hand. Her eyes were still locked on his huge pistol as the finger of her right hand moved again, first forward, then back. All she could think of was the people at the firing range calling her little revolver tiny and weak, with the scattered holes across the target almost never inside the rings. 

But he was much closer.

A red splotch blossomed on his chest with the next shot, even though it did not seem to slow him down. It had only taken one bullet to kill any number of people on television or movies, and she could remember the protests of her teachers about trigger-happy cops or vigilantes filling the corpses of their victims full of bullet holes.

The next two shots blurred together as he finished his turn, stumbling and starting to fall with the deadly black pistol falling out of his hand. She lowered her aim as he dropped and fired again, the last shot passing through his side and blowing a hole in the floor as he landed in a welter of blood.

In the resulting silence, mixed with the screams of the other customers, she could hear a clicking noise which only stopped when she finally quit pulling the trigger. The stunning explosions of gunfire still rang in her ears and the stench of burnt gunpowder made her cough, but she watched as the body of the man she had just killed stopped moving. 

He breathed out his last breath in a bubbling froth and just lay there as she sucked in her first breath in what seemed like forever.

I just wanted a sandwich.

I just wanted…

I just…