Two nuns from South America, brown paper bags of pan de agua from a nearby panadería clutched under their arms, crossed a bustling street into the Rio Piedras mercado about two blocks east of the main University of Puerto Rico campus. Chugging, smoke-belching city buses rumbled down the loud, narrow streets toward the main local terminal just to the north of the busy marketplace.
The nuns had paused at an outer stall at the edge of the Mercado to haggle over the price of some late season cneppas, a grape-like fruit from the hilly countryside outside the capitol of San Juan, when the boy ran past them waving a long shiny switchblade knife. He jostled one of the nuns, knocking the bread out of her hands. She looked up, angry at first then terrified, just as two uniformed policemen came in the back of the mercado from the university side in pursuit of the boy.
Rushing by the souvenir store with it’s cheap ashtrays in the shape of Puerto Rico and overpriced glossy conch shells and past the rows of coffee bins filled with aromatic beans from Colombia, Nicaragua, and Cuba, the police drew their sidearms and fired at the retreating figure of the youth.
Amid the shouting and bedlam of the customers and vendors ducking for cover, the panicked boy ran headlong into a fish stall, spun around and froze. The policemen fired three times, hitting the boy in the chest twice. He fell backwards onto the chilled flesh and dirty ice of the stall, his knife clattering along the concrete floor of the mercado.
“He robbed the hamburger place by the university,” one of the policemen explained to the bewildered crowd.
“He wouldn’t stop,” the other policeman said.
“He wouldn’t stop,” the first policeman repeated.
Some of the crowd gathered around the dead boy, staring fixedly at his bleeding body lying there among the ice-covered fish. Blood from his wounds drained onto the ice. The fish vendor tried to wipe it off with a soiled rag.
One of the policemen picked up the boy’s knife and put it in his pocket. One of the South American nuns coughed, then turned and vomited onto the mercado floor. An old lady near her gagged. The fish vendor kept trying to wipe the blood off the fish.
J.B. Hogan is a writer living in Fayetteville, Arkansas. His work has appeared in Bewildering Stories, Avatar Review, Copperfield Review, Ascent Aspirations, Megaera, The Pedestal Magazine, San Francisco Review of Books, and elsewhere.