Brevi che ti passa (Short stories to Read your troubles away)

SCANDALO A CORTE (Scandal at Court)

“I love you!”

“I love you too.”

They had exchanged languid glances, tender touches and hurried kisses, their bodies lightly pressed against each other by the solid wooden table in the rustic drawing room of the country villa.

Such open displays of affection were hardly customary among people of their social standing, nor could they be considered a sign of good breeding. Certainly not in public. Least of all before an audience so elegant and of such exalted rank.

For however ardently they might have wished otherwise, they were not alone. They were surrounded by noblemen and ladies of equal, if not even higher, station.

And yet the fire of their love burned so fiercely that it made them forget even the most elementary rules of etiquette, leading them down the murky paths of overwhelming passion. Blinded by desire, they could only hope to escape notice amid the great confusion of the gala they were attending.

Fear sometimes drives us to extreme choices. To reckless acts. To errors of judgement.

That was his mistake.

The entire world seemed to turn upside down around him and, for a moment, he thought he might lose consciousness.

He had no time to understand what was happening.

All he saw were those narrow eyes, slit-like, staring coldly at him.

Soulless.

And those hands. Those hands! Strong. Quick.

Decisive.

He was seized in one determined movement, brutally separated from his lady and the other guests, and slammed violently against the same wooden table that, only minutes before, had served them as an uncomfortable yet welcoming alcove.

The gangster's face lit up with a malicious smile, dripping with the arrogance of victory.

Then came a whisper.

“Royal flush.”

In Gianfranco Onatzirò Obinu's short fiction, the writing moves freely between very different registers while retaining a distinctly theatrical quality. Words do more than describe: they stage the action. At times, they draw the reader into an almost physical, sensory experience, only to overturn their perception of what is happening; at others, they build through rapid-fire, paradoxical dialogue, laced with black humour, wordplay and sudden excursions into the absurd.

These stories do more than simply “tell a story”. Each is designed as a mechanism: a short, precise trajectory constructed to surprise, wrong-foot the reader and leave an echo after the final line.

His style moves between narrative tension and irony, the tangible and the uncanny. Even in the shortest pieces, the effect is often that of a miniature stage scene: a voice, a rhythm, an opening image that gradually begins to crack, leading the reader towards an unexpected shift in perspective. The everyday can turn grotesque, comedy can open onto the unsettling, and pain can assume an unexpected form.

A scandal of such proportions, however, could hardly pass unnoticed.

A stout lady, decorated like a Christmas tree and forcibly squeezed into a heavy dark-blue gown exquisitely embroidered in gold, stood not far from the two reckless lovers and even closer to a blond, curly-haired gentleman whose gaze seemed somewhat vacant.

She began commenting loudly on the scene, making quite certain that he could hear her.

“What a disgrace! Some people have absolutely no sense of shame! Indulging in such indecency! And in the presence of His Majesty and his court, of all places! Young people with neither honour nor future! They should cut off their heads! In my day, they would have cut off his head and shut her away in a convent of cloistered nuns! And where is her chaperone? She should be whipped. That's what she deserves. Whipped!”

The torrent of words poured mercilessly over the unfortunate curly-haired gentleman who, lost in thoughts known only to himself, remained entirely unmoved. He merely continued staring at some distant point, idly twirling his thin, immaculately groomed moustache, curved like the horns of a buffalo.

The threatening speech also reached the ears of the two passionate lovers, though it had a very different effect on them.

Especially on the handsome gentleman with the proud gaze.

He scanned the room nervously, searching through the crowd for some possible escape route should events suddenly take a turn for the worse.

It wasn't so much the thought of death that frightened him.

It was the thought of losing his beloved.

He spotted the sovereign a short distance away, pleasantly engaged in conversation with his queen.

Both distracted.

Perhaps they could slip behind them.

Perhaps they could make it...