Superhero Universe: Tesseracts Nineteen (38 page)

Hoist with your own petard, motherfukkah!
you shout as you tie him like his buddy, all yoga-pose on his stomach with wrists lashed to ankles. The woman — a girl really, you can see now she’s close up, though the years have not been kind — comes over and kicks him a few times with the scuffed toes of her red pointy flats while you look away, out of politeness. You’ve already texted Emergency Services, the single word like always, so they know it’s you, know you’ve got criminals waiting and the cops should hurry their asses up if they want to make a bust.

POW!
is what you texted. Global positioning and fancy Emergency Services equipment can figure out the rest.

The girl thrusts her hands down the pants of first the big guy, then the little one, ignoring the one’s tears and the other’s threats. She comes over with two wads of cash, rubber-banded rolls of bills as good as any you’ve ever seen hidden down the pants of a petty street hoodlum playing it big. She hands you one roll and shoves the other up her skirt, and after a grim nod of thanks turns and marches off into the scraggly line of trees behind the fast food dumpster over the rise.

Hearing the whine of sirens, you tuck that wad into the waistband of your microfibre supertights and shoot straight up into the air, a beacon so the cops know exactly where to look before you head home.

Sticking around to fill out paperwork really isn’t your job anymore.

WEDNESDAY

One good thing about Wednesday is, it’s karaoke night down at the bar.

You’d think hanging out in a basement dive with a bunch of washed-up single losers would be depressing, but it isn’t. Makes you feel maybe it’s not all your fault you’re looking at middle age like staring down the barrel of a gun, no family, no friends to speak of, no savings, and no prospects. Feels good to peer around the darkened room at other patrons, their skin washed in the same dim green glow as yours from the crappy lighting, and think maybe you don’t have it so bad after all.

Your turn comes at the mike and you get up, sing a Billie Holiday song — “Gloomy Sunday” — sing it like her, breathy and lonely and lost. Except you don’t sing the final stanza. The music keeps spooling out the “It was all a dream” cop-out verse, words scrolling across that big green screen over the bar, but you only schlump back to your stool, start sucking on your drink, not caring if anybody gives a damn whether you finished the song or not.

Order another drink. And another after that. And then another.

THURSDAY

It’s unfortunate, but Thursday is a total washout. The day started as one big blinding hangover and got worse from there. You thought a little hair of the dog that bit you might help, so you scrounged around for Bloody Mary fixings. You remember your ex called — the voice of an angel! — and invited you to a barbecue at her place Sunday. Says she has some big news, wants you to be a part of her happiness. She doesn’t say what the news is (you know she’s been seeing that Random Asshole for about a year now), but she probably didn’t really expect you to say you’d come.

But you did, you remember that much. You insisted you wanted more than anything in this world to come to her party on Sunday and congratulate her in person, a goodbye and no-hard-feelings sort of deal. And then you remember stumbling to the corner liquor store and buying another bottle of vodka.

You don’t remember anything after that.

FRIDAY

Weekends, there’s always plenty to do. Large gatherings, too much alcohol, people out swimming and driving and motocrossing and bungee jumping— every hour there’s a dozen fires for you to put out, both figurative and literal. You know you could try to move up in the world, seek out the glory jobs, go where all the action takes place: New York, London, Tokyo; bombings, government coups, giant monsters from space… but this is your home town, man. You grew up here, had your first kiss in that park you can see from the corner of your eye and a hundred feet up. Had your first beer in that same park a year later, your first joint the year after that. Lost your virginity not long after about six blocks away, the backseat of her brother’s car, which hadn’t run since 1962 though he worked on it every day since he’d dropped out of school and told you not to date his little sister or he’d kick your ass.

You smile, thinking about your childhood, your life before the accident down at the power plant where your dad worked before you and his dad before that. Coal, electricity, nukes: it’s all the same to the guys with the blue shirts and the hard hats, whose job is only to shovel, to dig, to press buttons without asking why or how or what.

And then came the accident, you the only survivor, nobody expecting you to live after the levels of exposure you got. What made you the lucky son-of-a-bitch with the weird, mutative DNA? All your buddies died on the line that day, biggest tragedy this town had seen since the Great Mine Collapse of 1897. Some died quick, blown to pieces from the explosion, and some died slow, rotting away from the inside over the next few weeks or months or even year.

Except you. It was like you got the strength of the ten men who died, like it all flowed into you as it drained from them, leaving two bereft girlfriends and one grieving fiancée and seven widows and fifteen half-orphans, all of whom still look at you with accusation written on their faces, if and when they look at you at all. It’s not
that
big a city though, so some of them go to quite a bit of trouble not to see you, ever.

Yessir: you are one lucky son-of-a-bitch.

SATURDAY

Saturday barely deserves separation from Friday. You don’t sleep much on weekends; it all rolls together into one long two-day hell of rescuing drowning children at the lake and trussing up would-be muggers in back alleys near the bar district (Emergency Services text
P-O-W-!
) and saving pomeranians and their old ladies from fifth-storey condos on fire. You nap when you can between one emergency and the next, wondering when you’ll stop trying to make up for ten deaths you can never undo, that weren’t even your fault in the first place.

SUNDAY

Let yourself sleep in, you poor bastard. That’s right. And when you do get up at last, sun slanting harsh and high through the blinds, don’t worry about all those empty pizza boxes stacked by the back door, or the unpaid bills stacked on that rickety hall table near the front. Don’t worry too much that your savings from the old government gig have truly run out, or that your fancy-fibre suit is starting to go at the seams and you have no way to replace it. Even if you had time for a regular job, which you certainly do
not
, a thing like that suit would be way beyond the finances of an ordinary citizen.

That’s you: an ordinary citizen. Dropped out of high school because who were you kidding? You were going to go work at the plant like your dad and your granddad, both heavy chain-smokers and dead from not dissimilar cancers long before your accident. Mom lasted a few years longer, but she was a smoker too. You have a mortgage on a house you don’t even like anymore, your back hurts when you wake up each day, and you really should schedule a dental appointment one of these years. You’re afraid you’re developing one of those prostate problems you’ve read about, but are too scared to actually see a doctor because what if something really
is
wrong down there? No amount of flying around in the sky or bending steel bars or stopping bullets can make something like
that
go away.

Then it hits you: you promised to go to your ex’s barbecue, promised to be happy for her happiness and not punch her new man in the face.

Reaching for your supertights, you realize this might be an occasion better suited to civvies. You fling those things aside (ignore the sparking zap when they hit the far wall— that’s probably
not
the nanocircuitry giving up for good, shorting out, leaving a black smoky smudge on the sheetrock) and reach for jeans. One leg at a time, just like everybody else.

It’s been forever since you’ve taken the bus, but you lost your license a couple years back (driving under the influence) and flying is way faster and easier and cheaper anyway. Doesn’t feel right to fly around in jeans and a T-shirt, though; what kind of jerkoff does something like that?

So you arrive a little late to a party in full swing (you forgot how long it takes to ride the goddamn bus), hotdogs and hamburgers piled by the grill like a mountain of burnt pulverized flesh (which is exactly what it is; you’ve been to more than one house fire, so you know what you’re talking about). She, as always, is the kind and gracious woman you fell in love with. She murmurs hello and says she’s glad you came (though you see in her eyes she wishes you’d decided to give this one a pass), kisses your cheek, and glides off to greet somebody else. Your head spins from her honeysuckle scent and the lingering tingle where her fingers brushed your arm.

Thank goodness your old boss (her father, your ex-father-in-law-to-be) is too busy playing euchre by the pool to notice you’re here. You chug the first beer too fast and the second one faster, part of your brain you can never turn off calculating how long it would take to rescue that kid from the pool if he suddenly started drowning, or how many trips it would take to carry everybody to safety if a ring of fire inexplicably erupted around the yard, or how fast you could fly grandma to the hospital if her pacemaker exploded.

The third beer you didn’t notice going down. It’s after the fourth that you punch the Random Asshole in the face.

Of course between the third and the fourth had come the formal announcement of the forthcoming nuptials, which everybody in attendance pretty much expected. Then the announcement of the baby on the way, which nobody seems surprised by either, other than you. You it hits in the gut like a bullet at close range, except a bullet would’ve been easier to take, because your body would’ve worked its magic and pushed that bloody thing back out of your flesh. An hour later you’d have only a bruise where the hole had been, and an hour after that not even a dimple to mark the spot. This, about your ex and her new guy and their baby on the way, will stay with you forever.

Sure, a bitter laugh escaped you — how could it not? — and her father your ex-employer the Commissioner noticed you then, he sure did. And he’d come over, gotten up in your grill, shouting, telling you what a rotten way you’d treated his lovely daughter (as if you didn’t already know). And you were taking it! Not objecting or anything (everything he said was true, every goddamn word), but still that idiot new guy comes and asks you to leave. A few more words were said, and some might argue over who threw the first punch, but that’s about the time you finished your fourth beer, set the empty carefully on the grass, and socked that Random Asshole in the face.

When you’re cursed with superstrength, pulling punches is way harder than reeling them out. You probably hurt the guy slightly more than you’d intended, but nothing to send him to the hospital; she’d never forgive you for that. Just enough to give him the excuse he needed to clock you good (well, as good as an average works-out-at-the-Y kind of guy can). And her dad gets in his couple licks, which is only right. And the guys from down at the bureau who know the family well enough to come to a barbecue, a party at the house of a girl some have known since she was an itty-bitty thing visiting daddy at work— well, they all rush to the rescue. Hell, some are probably friends of guys who died that day at the plant, maybe even distantly related, because it really is that kind of town.

You fight back enough to convince them to pummel the shit out of you as best they can, though the most painful part is the sorrow in her voice as she asks them to stop, begs them to stop, pleads with you and with them, and cries.

They finally wind down. You get up from where you lie curled on the grass. The black-guts smell of charred meat hangs heavy in the air from the unattended grill as you limp away too ashamed to let them see you fly when you’re dressed like they are, in jeans and a T-shirt like an ordinary citizen.

Still limping, you walk the long way home to your empty house, ignore the unpaid bills and the pizza boxes, knowing tomorrow you’ll wake up and all your bones will ache, every single one.

* * *

Alex C. Renwick divides her time between Vancouver, BC, Portland, OR, and Austin, TX. As Camille Alexa, she’s the author of
Push of the Sky
.

Change as Seen through an Orrery of Celestial Fire

Michael Matheson

Shurui peels long strips of burnt skin off her shoulders in front of the bathroom mirror. She grits her teeth as they tear away down her back. The days between immolations are always painful; the moments in which she burns down to ash blinding, but nothing compared to the waiting— to the slow build of days before the fire frees. Her body a cage, too-narrow knit with bird-hollow bones.

The rest — the rebirth and what comes after—

—The rest is agony.

Has been since she first rose, broken, garbed in lank, slick flesh. Since she tumbled to Earth in a scatter of pinions, remiges, and retrices; her sun-bright feathers ripped away in the heat of her descent. Since she spotted the first Xifeng bathing in a moonlit lake. And fell.

The whole of it, now and always, Chang’e’s fault. A terrible gift she hadn’t known better than to accept.

“You all right?” asks Zetian from the doorway. Her lover takes a step into the bathroom to lay a glacial hand on Shurui’s burning back. The frost of Zetian’s fingers a momentary respite.
Like scorched, shed feathers brushing the surface of a distant, long-ago lake bathed silver
. Zetian’s qi strong, but mortal. The ice coating her hand fades in a swift billow of steam. It fills the air between them. Zetian barely draws her hand back in time to avoid burned fingers.

“It’s bad this time,” she says quietly.

“Too long between burns,” grunts Shurui, breathing through her mouth.

It’s been a long time since their last trip to Mount Sinai Hospital. Most of those visits not long after they officially got together. After they decided to try living together instead of just falling into Zetian’s bed most nights. After Shurui carted her couple of boxes worth of possessions on the TTC up to Zetian’s Spadina and Willcocks apartment from her own place in the Market.