As he jogged across the parking lot, he noticed the fat bodies standing there like stone statues, the only movement the rising and falling of their chests as they panted. He recognized a few of the faces as customers he’d seen throughout the day. They just stared at the restaurant, taking no notice to anything going on around them. Some of them still had sauce coating their faces.

Pinche cerdos.

MONSTERS OF OBESITY

Lola inhaled deeply and fluttered her eyes as the smoke slid down her throat. The filter of the Marlboro was dented by her fore and middle fingers as she squeezed it to keep her hand from shaking. No matter how many times she spat or rinsed her mouth out, she couldn’t get the sting of vomit out. It coated the interior like dead skin.

She still felt the violence of the gun in her hand, couldn’t shake it off. The hand dangled limply at her side and she couldn’t even look at it. It was the first time she’d ever fired her gun at anyone. A lot of officers go their whole careers without ever doing it, and here she was, a month in, already one kill notch on her belt.

The scene played itself over and over in her mind, and no matter what she did, she couldn’t make it stop; even invited the memory of her father, but he didn’t show. She saw the officer lying beneath the fat man, his mouth all gum and teeth, a bloody tongue swirling in the air like a tentacle. His limbs thrashed, the rubber of his shoes and his damp fingertips squeaking against the floor.

She saw the bullet enter the fat man’s chest. Right between the tits. Ripples danced across the blubbery body. He still reached for Lola, the handcuffs dangling from his wrist. Just before he collapsed, just before his brain told the rest of him that he was dead, he gave Lola a look. A look that said, “How could you do this to me? You know this isn’t my fault.” And then he fell backward, smacked against the floor like a slab of beef. The lower half of his body landed on the officer’s stomach and knocked the wind from him. The struggling officer’s teeth clicked together as he gurgled and choked on his own blood.

Lola just stood there and stared. Her fellow officers patted her on the back, congratulated her as if shooting the guy was some kind of rookie initiation.

But it’s my fault. I shouldn’t have taken the cuffs off.

As other officers struggled to move the now dead weight of the man off of the lipless officer, a deep rumbling made them retreat backward a step or two. The dead man’s bowels, surely on the brink of exploding with all the food crammed into his stomach, let loose. The man’s pants had fallen halfway down his ass, and thick, molten shit poured and sprayed past the beltline and onto the wriggling officer beneath. Brown liquid painted his exposed gums. It took nearly everybody in the station to roll that big son of a bitch off while their fellow officer hollered something awful. Lola could hear his screams even as the ambulance took him away.