text: Grandmother Lovely By Skye Woods Maria Alvarez's heart slammed against her chest after she watched two police officers shoot an innocent African-American teenager. The teenager who suffered being killed was a thirteen-year-old honor roll student. The young man was a hero because before being killed by the police he had just saved a little boy from being hit by a car while walking to school. Instead of being thanked by the child’s mother for his heroic actions, the teenager ended up getting shot to death by two racist police officers, who thought he was reaching for a gun. The teenager got into an altercation with the two policemen, when the two officers said that he fit the profile of a wanted suspect. The policemen killed the teenager, even after they witnessed him saving a child’s life. Maria felt outraged after witnessing the two policemen shoot an innocent thirteen-year-old boy to death. When Maria woke up in the morning, she somehow knew that two cops would shoot an innocent teenager right in front of her house. Sometimes she could see the future and she knew that the policemen would kill the teenager because the child’s Nubian black skin color made him a threat, even after he saved a two-year-old baby from being struck by a car. Maria knew that the two policemen would shoot the teenager, and she also knew what it felt like to have a bullet inside her. One night while Maria was at a gas station, an attacker tried to rob her and he ended up shooting her multiple times in her back and in her chest. But Maria didn’t even have to go to the hospital that night after being shot eleven times by the carjacker. She ended up killing the carjacker when he attempted to steal her SUV with her four-year-old grandson still in the backseat. The carjacker threatened to shoot Maria’s grandbaby if she attempted to stop him from stealing her car. The carjacker underestimated Maria thinking she was an average helpless old lady. Maria broke the carjacker’s neck with one arm and she dislocated the man’s arm before officially killing him. Maria killed plenty of criminals over the years, and the carjacker was one of many. Maria was a sixty-three-year-old woman who used to be a rock musician, and she looked younger than her age. She had spiky silver hair that had a purplish tinge. She wore earrings shaped like skull heads and she also wore a silver ring in her nose. Since Maria was a huge rock fan and a former rock artist herself, she had the logo of the rock band Van Halen tattooed on her right arm, and she tattooed the young face of rocker Jon Bon Jovi on her left. Maria was a very attractive old lady and her clothing style was gothic. She loved wearing her black dresses and her black leather motorcycle jacket. Maria’s gothic fashion blended well with her very shapely and well-sculpted breasts and hips. She found it funny that at her age she still would get asked out on dates by younger men who were old enough to be her grandsons. Maria would have to reject the advances of younger men because number one, she was too old for them, and number two, she wasn’t ready to enter the dating scene again. The last man Maria dated was her husband. Maria had to watch her husband die all because she refused to do a job for a London crime lord, and she also refused to do a job for the boss of an underground Japanese crime syndicate. Maria had a dark past that went with her. She used to be a former rock musician, but her rock career was only her part-time job. Maria used to be an agent for the CIA, and she was one of the best operatives the CIA ever had. But Maria ended up getting laid off from her job because of government budget cuts and new CIA recruitments who were far younger than her and could do the job longer. It didn’t hurt Maria when she lost her job, but she tried to search for a new job that demanded her skill set, which was killing people. When Maria first joined the CIA, she didn’t start out as a killer, but a hero. It was fun at first when she had to execute a terrorist leader or a corrupt politician, but things took a dark turn for Maria when she had to carry out assassinations that required killing innocent people. Maria was an efficient killer, and she could execute using anything as a weapon. She once killed a man ten times her size using a screwdriver and when she had a gun in her hand, she had a special gift at shooting with deadly precision. One time she had to assassinate five men who were terrorists, and she ended up killing all five of the men using one handgun that only had two bullets. She killed three men using one bullet, and she killed the other two men using her hands instead of the gun. Maria loved using knives and swords. She perfected the art of knife throwing and her favorite sharp weapon was a sword. She remembered after getting hired as an assassin; Her boss gave her a contract to kill a rival London crime boss. After Maria lost her job with the CIA, she began looking for a job that paid and she knew that becoming a contract killer wasn’t the best option, but she did it because working as a cashier at a local Walmart wasn’t paying enough. Maria remembered the night she had to kill the London crime lord. She remembered how he was a burly and rugged man who collected Samurai swords and displayed them on the wall of his office inside of a nightclub he owned. Maria remembered the look on the London crime boss’s face when he tried to shoot her using his machine gun. The man watched in shock as Maria slapped down every single bullet that came out of his machine gun. She even sliced some bullets in half using one of his Samurai swords. The London crime lord never thought he’d see an old woman do something that was impossible, and he also never thought a beautiful old lady would end up chopping off his head using one of his Samurai swords. Maria remembered what she was wearing the night she chopped the London gangster’s head off. She remembered how his blood splattered all over her black leather jacket and the white sleeveless dress she wore beneath it. Maria never forgot how she carried the London crime lord’s head with one hand while using the Samurai sword in her other hand to slaughter thirty of the London crime lord’s bodyguards. Maria remembered how she turned a South East London nightclub into a war zone using the sword to execute one man after the next. Young men and women were on the nightclub’s dance floor, moving to the sound of hip-hop and electro dance music. The young men and women were oblivious to Maria who was running and flipping across the nightclub’s floor avoiding gunfire and chopping off heads, arms, and legs using her sword. This was the night that Maria discovered she had supernatural powers. While fighting inside the nightclub, Maria ended up getting shot thirty times. But the bullet wounds would heal in a matter of seconds, and Maria couldn’t feel the pain of the gunshots. The nightclub became vacant when Maria started shooting explosions of white fire out of her hands. All the young men and women who were dancing to the club music ran from the nightclub. Maria was alone standing in the middle of the dark club holding a London crime lord’s head in her hand and looking around at the sea of dead men’s bodies that surrounded her bare feet. It was a night to remember for Maria. She thought about how she was racing through the streets of London on her motorcycle, holding a man’s severed head and realizing that she was the world’s most dangerous assassin at fifty-nine-years-old, which was her age at the time. Being an assassin at first felt good for a moment, but Maria soon grew tired of killing people. She didn’t mind executing criminals, but she had a problem with killing innocent people. Maria had to find a way out even though she knew there would be consequences. Becoming a contract killer gave Maria a one-hundred-thousand-dollars a year, and Maria enjoyed the money, but she felt that she was losing her soul. There was an underground secret society for contract killers that Maria was a part of. The only way you could leave the society was by sacrificing a loved one. Maria didn’t want to lose her husband, but it was the only way she could get out of the game. Her husband, Frank, even agreed to have himself killed so that his wife could be free from being a member of the underground world of assassins. Maria remembered how her husband blew a kiss at her before getting shot in his head at point-blank range. This story could have ended sadly, but just because Maria watched her husband get shot right in front of her doesn’t mean he died. Maria soon discovered that she had the ability to resurrect the dead, and that’s what she did to her husband. Maria never forgot how she almost gave her daughter Jenny a heart attack. When Jenny went to visit her mother, she almost went into shock when she saw her father sitting at the dining room table after just attending his funeral a month ago. Maria had a lot of explaining to do to her daughter and even after explaining her supernatural gift to Jenny, Jenny couldn’t believe it. Maria tried to explain to her daughter that after she became a born again Christian, she felt something enter her body. It was something that Maria never felt before like a supernatural charge running through her veins. Maria also told her daughter she was a former assassin and that she used her God-given gift to resurrect all the innocent people the government sent her to kill. It was a hard thing to explain to her daughter, but God helped her. Maria was a goddess or at least that’s what she felt like, thanks to the God she believed in. God had given her powerful gifts and now every criminal who lived in the state of Texas feared Maria because she had become a new assassin. She was an assassin who now worked for God instead of working for a crime boss. Maria had a smile on her face when she first woke up in the morning. She did not know that she would walk out on her front porch to witness a child get shot to death by two trigger-happy police officers. Before she saw the policemen shoot and kill the teenager, Maria could hear the boy shouting at the two policemen. “Man, fuck y’all! I was just walking to school, and I ran out into the street to save this baby from being hit by a car! Now y’all gonna try to arrest me and I didn’t even do nothing!” That’s what Maria heard the black teenager say to the policemen through his tears. While arguing with the policemen, the teenager reached for his smartphone in his back pocket so he could call his mom. When Maria walked out on her front porch, that’s when she saw the teenager reaching for his phone, and that’s when she witnessed the two policemen open fire on the child, assuming that he was reaching for a firearm. It enraged Maria to see that after the two policemen discovered that the teenager didn’t have a weapon, to exclude themselves of committing murder, the two policemen planted a small twenty-two caliber pistol in the dead teenager’s hand, to make it look like the child was armed and that the officers were only defending themselves. This angered Maria. It angered her so much that she crushed in her hand a hot cup of coffee she was drinking. Maria looked down at the blood and the broken pieces of glass in her hand that used to be a coffee mug. The gothic grandmother watched as the bloody cuts in her hand healed up in an instant. Maria’s body transformed into a state of invincibility and she was a sixty-three-year-old woman who now had bulletproof skin, thanks to God. Through her years of working for the CIA, Maria witnessed countless acts of racism. She realized that the U.S. government was the biggest racist organization in the world. Maria was glad that the CIA ended her employment after she secretly discovered a top-secret government program that involved killing off all African Americans. The government planned to release a bioweapon into the drinking water that ran through inner-city neighborhoods and places heavily populated with blacks. Besides corrupting the water filtration plants near inner-city neighborhoods, Maria also discovered how the government was using law enforcement to kill off young African Americans. But what Maria discovered was only the tip of the iceberg. There were darker government secrets, and one of them involved a top-secret program called Operation Nightfall. The Operation Nightfall program involved creating a neuro-gas that was colorless and odorless and could only affect the minds of people of African American descent. The name of this neuro-gas was X714. Once X714 becomes inhaled through the nose and mouth of an African American man, woman, or child, it triggers chemicals in the brain such as Serotonin that causes deep depression and suicidal tendencies. The government planned to not only use X714 to kill off African Americans in the United States but they also planned to use their bio-weapons throughout the world, especially in Africa and in Haiti. X714 would exterminate every starving baby, every mother, every father, every African tribe and all African families who lived in every African continent. X714 would cause every person of color to fall into a deep depression and commit suicide, along with every black person living in the U.S. and across the world. X714 would affect African American celebrities and even an African American woman who was the president of the United States. It was the rise of a deadly bio-engineered disease that would cause an already oppressed race of people to kill themselves, and soon the African race would become extinct. X714 was in its early stages of development. The government released samples of the weapon into the air over parts of Chicago such as the Southside, and in parts of California, such as Compton, Los Angeles. The government still had to work a few bugs out of X714, because instead of causing suicides, it would cause black on black crime, race riots, and irrational violence and anger with African American young men. Black people were still destroying themselves through poverty, drugs, criminal activity, and gang violence because of X714, but it wasn’t the way the government wanted blacks to kill themselves. Committing suicide was a much cleaner and efficient way of destroying a race of people. It would take years to make X714 perfect so that the bio-engineered chemical weapon could do what the government designed it to do. At first, the government considered bringing slavery back, but they felt that eradicating black people altogether was a better plan. X714 would be the answer to a racist white person’s prayer. There would not be any more prejudice towards black people and fear towards black people thanks to X714. The little mind of a racist white man or woman would be at peace because they didn’t have to worry about their sons and daughters marrying a black person or worrying about black families moving into their neighborhood. Thanks to the U.S. government, X714 was on the rise and Operation Nightfall was starting its process of destruction. But the U.S. government and their brilliant team of military scientists had a problem. That problem was Maria Alvarez. A grandmother who was a former rock musician, a former CIA agent and a former assassin who would cause the U.S. government a world of trouble because of her God-given supernatural abilities. Maria would not stop and she was a powerful and relentless killer. Imagine the fictional action movie hero, John Wick, only if John Wick was a beautiful Hispanic sixty-three-year-old woman with short spiky hair and supernatural gifts. It was all going to crash and burn for the U.S. government. Maria stood on the steps of her porch watching the two policemen who were standing over the black teenager’s body mumbling to each other and speaking into their police radios. Maria felt herself becoming more infuriated while listening to the conversation between the two policemen. They were talking as if they were at a restaurant. Maria could see that one policeman was far younger than his partner. He had blonde hair and a clean-shaven face with a medium build and pale white skin. Maria thought the younger policeman had a boyish face. He looked like a nerdy little boy with a man’s body which irritated Maria. From his looks, she could tell that he was a rookie. The much older policeman looked ruggedly handsome in the face. He looked like the cowboy type, sporting a thick gray mustache, a three-day beard and experienced wrinkles in his square-shaped face. Gray peppered his hair, and he was balding a little at the top of his head. The older cop had a bigger and bulkier body compared to his younger partner. The older policeman also wore dark aviator sunglasses that concealed his lifeless eyes. Maria began to saunter down the steps of her home while listening to what the older policeman was saying to his younger partner. “We’re not getting in trouble for this,” the older policeman stated. “Yeah, but he didn’t have a gun.” The young policeman said. “That’s why we planted the gun on him to make it look like he had one. We want this execution to look legitimate to the public.” The older policeman gave his partner a confident smile. “It felt good firing a gun for the first time.” The younger policeman chuckled. But he was looking around to see who was watching the two of them. “Yeah, it always feels good firing a gun for the first time. Now we shot this boy, but we shot a black boy which is a good thing because we’re only doing our jobs as government officials. We’re doing what our government wants us to do. We’re supposed to annihilate some of these black folks, but make it look subtle and accidental,” the older policeman told his partner through his Southern drawl while gently nudging the black teenager’s dead body with the tip of his cowboy boot. “We shoot unarmed black kids all the time because we’re supposed to. That’s our job now given to us by our government. Once we report this to the organization director, we’ll go grab something to eat.” The older policeman patted his partner on the back while turning his head and looking to see Maria, who was approaching them from behind. The older policeman at first didn’t know how to react to Maria, who was creeping up towards the residential street where the two cops were standing. “What’s the matter?” The younger policeman asked before turning his head and seeing Maria approaching them. “You want me to stop her? It looks like she’s coming over here.” The young policeman didn’t even wait for an answer. He turned around and began telling Maria to stay back. “Excuse me, ma’am. We’re gonna need you to stay back.” The younger policeman spoke calmly as he began approaching Maria with his hands out in front of him, trying to stop her. When the young policeman placed his hands on Maria’s arms, it was the worst thing he ever did. The young policeman screamed when Maria took hold of one of his hands and began crushing it like it was a soda pop can. The young policeman screamed out in pain as he heard the bones breaking in his hand, which sounded like tree branches getting snapped in half. “I’m sorry,” Maria hissed out her insincere apology to the young policeman while crushing his hand down flat like a pancake and balling it up like it was a piece of paper. The young policeman screamed for his partner to help him as he watched his hand get turned into mush. The policeman wanted to reach for his gun, but he was in too much pain. Maria made things even worse for the young policeman when she reached down and grabbed the area where his penis and testicles were. The young policeman stopped screaming because the pain of feeling his penis and testicles getting crushed made his vocal cords lock up. After feeling the pain of a fist pierce through his torso combined with the earth-shattering pain of getting his genitals crushed, the young policeman’s heart stopped beating. Maria lifted the young policeman’s two hundred pound body off the ground by his throat after removing her fist from the police officer’s stomach. While Maria was mutilating the young policeman’s body, she was getting shot at by the older policeman who became overwhelmed with terror by what he was seeing. The older policeman was already horrified after watching Maria punch her fist straight through his partner’s stomach, but he was even more horrified because he couldn’t kill Maria no matter how many times he shot at her. The older policeman ended up unloading his gun on Maria. He watched as the bullets passed through Maria’s body and he saw how the bullet holes disappeared on her body, leaving behind not a single trace of blood. The older policeman dropped his gun on the ground with his body full of desperate fear. He watched Maria hurl his partner’s body into the air. The young policeman’s dead body landed on top of the hood of his squad car putting a huge dent in its hood. The older policeman thought the world was ending as he looked into the cunning hazel-gray eyes of a beautiful old Hispanic lady, who was approaching him with fire shooting out of her hands. Maria’s shapely hips were rotating beneath her tight-fitting denim blue jeans. Her wide breast bounced beneath her black sleeveless blouse and her skull pendant earrings were wildly swinging back and forth on her ears from every hard step she made towards the older policeman. It seemed like everything was moving in slow motion for the older policeman as he took off his sunglasses and dropped them on the ground while watching a blast of white fire head towards him. The pain was beyond excruciating. The older policeman went into shock as he felt his skin burning and melting away. He never thought he would experience getting burned alive, and it was an experience that Maria forced him to endure. The fire had engulfed the policeman’s body, and it made him look like a walking, screaming human torch. Maria folded her arms while watching the older policeman’s burning body slowly stumble down the street before collapsing to the ground like a burning pile of rubble. Maria could smell the fire cooking the policeman’s flesh, which reminded Maria of the smell of hamburgers cooking on a grill. After destroying the two policemen, Maria laid her eyes down on the body of the teenager who was lying on the sidewalk a few feet away from her driveway. While kneeling down on the ground beside the teenager’s body, Maria looked around to see people standing outside their homes and on the sidewalk watching her. Maria waved and smiled at her shocked neighbors while holding the African American teenager’s body across her lap. She took her attention off the shocked faces of her neighbors and put her eyes back down on the teenager’s face, with her fingers stroking through his well-trimmed afro. Maria could feel the blood leaking out of the bullet holes in the teenager’s body. While stroking the child’s head, she began healing all the bullet wounds on his body. Even his blood that stained the fabric of his blue basketball jersey was disappearing. While bringing the thirteen-year-old back to life, Maria admired the young man’s handsomeness. She admired his Nubian dark skin and his strong but baby-like facial features. She could see how his puberty was setting in from the peach fuzz beneath his nose, which would soon become a full mustache once he reached his twenties. A silver necklace hung around the teenager’s neck and it had a pendant hanging off of it which were two diamond-encrusted letters. The letters that hung from the necklace said JD, which were the child’s initials. Maria caressed her hand across a bullet hole in the child’s left arm. She also waved her hand across a bullet hole in the teenager’s neck. After removing twelve bullet holes in the teenager’s body, it was time to wake him up. “Wake up, baby,” Maria whispered down to the teenager with her hand caressing his face. She adjusted the child’s body across her lap before restarting his heart causing the thirteen-year-old to wake up gasping for air. The young man began taking air into his lungs and coughing as he opened up his eyes and looked up, to see a sweet but edgy faced old lady looking back down at him and giving him a loving smile. The teenager studied the silver ring in Maria’s nose and the silver stud pierced in her lip. He looked at her shimmering skull head earrings and he also noticed that Maria had a missing eyebrow. The teenager could see that Maria had a slight purplish color in her silvery short hair, and he admired her pretty but edgy facial features. The teenager had never seen such a cool looking old woman, and he had never seen an old lady with tattoos on her shapely arms. “Wow! Who are you?” The teenager asked Maria while looking at her through his cocoa-brown eyes filled with confusion and wonder. The young man watched as Maria slowly leaned down to kiss him on his forehead. Maria never answered the teenager’s question. The grandmother only smiled at the thirteen-year-old boy while gazing down at the lost expression on his face. She held the teenager in her lap while gazing down into his eyes for a good long time and stroking her fingers through his soft mini afro.