LITMIR.BIZ

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      Financial earthquake, my stocks were on freefall, my wife’s complaints were weighing me down and, if all that weren’t enough, the paranoid media was announcing an impending apocalypse—as if Lucifer himself were going to collide with the moon.

      I could even accept the surreal idea that a giant wave would level the ground all the way up to the entrance to Piacenza. “Maybe Po Valley would become a better place”—that seemed to be the popular joke for this foretold catastrophe.

      And then there was my boss and his excessive demands. I couldn’t put up with him for another second. He slashed the project budget in half, but kept the same specifications? That decision puzzled me for days.

      I was as stressed out as I could be and I wished I could have forgotten all about that entire week—if it weren’t for Maira’s first words.

      A mediocre management for the Homo sapiens of the 21^st century—I repeated to myself.

      However, the weekend held some interesting promises. Actually, we had a pleasant surprise on Saturday: Angelica and Tommy. Saying we were friends would be undermining our friendship, because we have known each other since we were kids, so we were almost siblings. Even though they lived about 125 miles away, they always seized the opportunity to come and visit us. We’d spend a nice time in good company, having fun while dusting off our childhood memories. They brought their first-born, Lorenzo, who was a little over one year old. He was a restless baby, about twenty or twenty-two pounds, with nice little rolls of fat, and his mother’s almond eyes. I watched in amusement as he and our daughter—at the tender age of two—were raising hell.

      Enjoying a nice T-bone steak and a glass of Chianti: that sounded like the best way to end the day on a high note. A nice time at a restaurant would restore our loquacity and keep us in high spirits.

      We left for a village up in the hills, located about twelve miles from my house, where there was a cozy country hotel I’d always go to in special occasions. It would take us twenty minutes or so to arrive at our destination some two thousand feet up the hill.

      We got in our cars and left the city behind us, taking a narrow, dark road away from traffic through the exuberant chestnut grove up the first hills in the Province of Reggio Emilia. A light fog covered the valley and, despite the limited visibility, it wasn’t a major issue—we had a GPS, just in case.

      I drove unhurriedly, listening to our little girl’s voice coming from her safe car seat in the back. My BMW was followed by my friends’ car, a silent electric minivan that was as dark as the valley below us. Letizia, my wife, was on the passenger seat, keeping an eye on little Maira and addressing all her requests—at that moment of leisure in particular, she wanted to entertain herself with her new favorite pastime: an annoying game on the smartphone. But it was Letizia herself who noticed a faint, blurry light amid the liquid water droplets suspended in the air.

      “Alex, what kind of weird light is that?” she asked me. “Where does it come from? I don’t remember any street lights on this road…”

      Until then, I hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary, and thought that blurry light could have been a vehicle coming our way. “I don’t see any alert on the radar about other vehicles in the vicinity. Only Tommy and I are driving up this road,” I told her after I checked the Augmented Reality app.

      I leaned forward to get closer to the windshield. Oddly enough, I couldn’t see any light posts, but the intensity was increasing to the point that the light became almost blinding. Tommy, who had been keeping a consistent distance from my car, started to signal to me with his headlights.

      “Alex! Alex! Look at the sky! It’s coming towards us!” my wife yelled.

      She seemed frightened, but I had known her for fifteen years and knew for a fact that she was easily impressed. By now, I was already used to her tendency to be alarmed. However, my blood ran cold when I was able to focus on that source of light hovering above our car. I felt a shiver down my spine and was petrified.

      Ever since I was a kid, I had shown great interest in mysteries, especially any news about unidentified flying objects. Wow! Is this really happening to me? It just can’t be… I’m a lucky bastard! A first-degree contact!—I thought to myself, being careful not to let my excitement show.

      My first reaction was to hit the brakes. I needed to get out of the vehicle to observe it better and avoid any misunderstanding. I wanted to shoot down any possibility of that being a mere helicopter. However, my sudden stop was an unfortunate one.

      We felt the jerk and, out of the corner of my eye, I could see Letizia’s body respond to the collision by moving forward and then pushing back against the seat. Then I heard Maira crying and screaming and was concerned for her safety.

      My car was pushed into a ditch on the side of the road, and it ended up in a dangerous angle; the back wheels and bumper were up in the air. I got out of the vehicle immediately, losing all interest in that source of light, to open the door to the backseat where my daughter was.

      “Tommy got distracted by the light, too?” my wife asked me. “Dammit! What about the emergency stop assistant?”

      “It’s all his fault! He always turns off the navigation app and there you have it!”

      Since we had been driving at a moderate speed, I knew that the crash wouldn’t have caused severe damage and calmed down after confirming that Maira was lively and reacting well after the fright. I put my daughter in Letizia’s arms and took them to a safe place behind a tall chestnut tree about thirty feet from the road. My wife squatted behind the solid tree trunk while holding our little girl.

      After making sure that my family was safe, I went to check on Tommy, Angelica, and Lorenzo. I wondered if the other car had got the worst part of the crash because it was coming from behind, considering the sudden deceleration and the head-on collision, and whether the passengers could have been hurt. I imagined the dramatic scene: heads against the windshield, the airbag hitting Lorenzo’s delicate head, and Angelica, my beautiful friend, with her face all cut up by the glass… No, Tommy is indestructible. He won’t be affected by a crash at twenty-five miles per hour—I repeated to myself. But, what about Lorenzo and Angelica? I hope they’re okay.

      The silver minivan was clearly visible in the middle of the road, about thirty feet away. I noticed immediately that Tommy had also left the driver’s seat to check on little Lorenzo in the backseat. My friend must have got hurt, because I noticed he was limping, but I could not see Angelica from where I was standing.

      In the meantime, that bright light was still hovering over our heads. I estimated it was about nine hundred eighty feet above the ground, but it was hard to tell for sure without knowing its exact dimensions. That light seemed to have been in a fixed position, as if it awaited the developments of the crash. It was round and irregular, but too bright to allow me to analyze it properly.

      “Stay here and don’t worry, everything’s alright,” I told my wife. “I need to help the others.”

      Letizia wasn’t a very brave woman. She actually started crying as soon as she realized I was walking away from her. Still, that wouldn’t keep me from the noble gesture of helping my dear friends.

      “Be careful!” she said. “Come back to us right away, please!”

      I ran toward their minivan. The dark, wet asphalt didn’t offer much traction, and I could have easily slipped. As I got closer, I heard Tommy yelling Lorenzo’s name and, as I reached their vehicle, I saw that the airbag had indeed been deployed and the boy was now lifeless in his father’s arms. Tommy turned around to face me and I could see terror in his wide-open eyes.

      As if it weren’t enough, the mysterious object in the sky started to hiss loudly, which made us cover our ears. However, we gladly noticed that the high-pitch noise made Lorenzo recover his senses.

      Angelica was left groggy on the passenger’s seat after the airbag caught her by surprise. She showed signs of recovery and the hiss had probably annoyed the hell out of her. I could see it in her

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