Thursday, August 30, 2007

Powers

It had to happen. I had to try and talk about superpowers. Here are some snippets.

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I think of the first beads of water to bubble up at the bottom of a boiling pot. Imagine that trembling, anxious fear all over your skin. The feeling comes from every pore, pouring out from the surface. Not a deep, gut feeling you feel inside your stomach. But, the pins and needles of blood rushing back to your limbs. Except this is all on fire. I am focusing energy and it is working!

I shaved my arms before trying this. The little ad at the back of Atomic Stories didn't say anything about shaving, but I thought it would help. This book was aimed at kids anyway. I don't remember my own arms from childhood, but they are certainly hairy now. Or used too, before I shaved. I read the rest of the ad for "Enchanted Defense for the Modern Age," but the little preview exercise doesn't tell you what to do with all this energy at the end of my fist. I hear my father in my head who was a technical writer that wrote, mostly, VCR manuals. "Instructions should never assume, son." I wonder what he would have to say about this. About how his pulp magazine actually worked and what to do with this missing information. I imagine lots of blown holes in the wall in mid 60's.

Unlike in the comics, the lights doesn't bulge out from my fist. Instead my arm shines in a shimmering iridescence, a peridot green that gets deeper at my fist. The ad never said anything about colors. There are no pictures at all! "Images are always helpful, son." My dad would rip this ad to shreds.

Neither does it say anything about my arm feeling heavy. Or that the joints of my elbow and knuckles tickle. I press my arm against a desk, it feels that cumbersome. The gypsum boars boils when my arm touches the top. The first layer bubbles up and peels away, exposing the sandy compressed particles of the interior. These then turn molten, burning and glowing like charcoal briquettes. I pull my arm away, but I don't remember the weight.

I drop to the floor and put my fist against the concrete of the basement floor. I hear a tiny "phoom" noise and then the crackle of splinters. The glow is gone, but under my fist I left a concrete divot in the floor. I am tired. Not just the arm, but my whole body. This feels like a gut feeling. Grabbing a softball from some scattered boxes I nestle it in the divot. A snug fit.
"All done, son."

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Recycling superhero! He exists! R3 gives the vilians something to watch out for. I saw him chasing a purse snatcher downtown. The snatcher had a good head start and R3 wears this sort-of armor made from bottle caps. It looked like the perp would get away, until R3 whipped out today's newspaper and touched it. Then, he somehow brought back all the recycled pulp that went into that. He reversed-recycled an entire paper just by touching it! And considering the Courier is printed on thin newsprint , the issue multiplied ten fold! A column of paper flew out from R3's fist. It shot down Second Street, each sheet leap frogging over the next and rammed straight into the back of the thief! Then R3 grabbed a soda can from his belt and turned into six little throwing stars! They flew fast and pinned the perp to the wooden scaffolding outside the Blue Street bus stop renovation. The local cops were then all over the perp. R3 dissappeared, riding his stack of paper up towards the rooftops. I tell my neighbors to recycle because it keeps our city safe.

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Eh? Just playing. Peace!

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