110

He was the Superman to my Lois Lane. Or was it Lana? Anyway, he was Superman, and he had it all. Everybody loved him; except his arch enemies, but that kind of jealousy was to be expected. He was invincible. He could do no wrong. He was desperately needed, especially by me. My knight in shining spandex, the savior of all.

We were married, and, yeah, being the object of jealousy was great; I finally knew the thrill Superman got from Lex Luthor's envy. It's because we were married that I found out Luthor's envy was misplaced. No one would be jealous if they knew what I knew: Superman was a royal bastard.

109

Still no signal, still alone. Maybe it was that she was hemmed in by tall brick buildings on both sides of the dim alley. Fiona held her phone higher then swore at herself for being stupid. Desperation makes everyone stupid, she thought, but sometimes it seems to work. Her flat sneakers slapped the damp brick pavement as she tried to find her way out of this warren. Fiona felt it was getting difficult to breathe, and she recognized the dull ache in her head as stress. Breathe, stupid. Don't worry yet.

She pulled her backpack onto both shoulders but kept her phone in her hand. At the end of every intersection, she redialed John's number, but got nowhere. One alley opened onto another, some brighter, some darker. Some empty, some not.

108

Eventually, you will be forgotten. Harsh, yes, but a reality you should face: you will be forgotten. Everyone who truly knew you by name will die. Your grandparents, your pets, your parents, your aunts and uncles, your older cousins, your younger cousins, your brothers and sisters all will die. If you have children, they may die; they may even "die of old age" before you. Your friends will all die. You will make more, but the further on in life you go, the faster those new friends will die. No one will be left who could say the color of your eyes. No one will be left who remembers the color of your hair. No one will be left to recognize your voice.
 
Once there is no one left who remembers you, how will you view yourself? Senility is a possibility, but it's not guaranteed. You remember you. You remember all those who loved you and are now gone. You remember the teen heartthrob you mooned over, long dead and unrecognized in conversation for decades. Your favorite things, the things you saved for, the things you wanted but couldn't afford, you can't find anymore. Nobody even remembers what they were used for. Forgotten. Just like you.
 
How do you view yourself? There is no one who shares your memories, your likes and dislikes. Who are you?
 
You are a time-traveler.

107

Luther thought back to when he still had his legs and hated himself for being so unappreciative. Stairs. His motorcycle. Regular shoes. They had given him prosthetic legs and he had dutifully learned how to use them, but they hurt and were awkward and he couldn't wear any of his old shoes. At least, he thought, my feet will never smell. At that, he burst into laughter that turned into tears, and the old people in the park stared at the crazy cripple.

106

The dry leaves sounded like insect husks stirred by shuffling feet in an empty room. The trees dropped their bones upon the cooling ground and they snapped under Kee's light boots. Only the stone markers seemed completely quiet, though they spoke to Kee in their fading fonts and weeping willows.

105

Marjorie did weird things when she thought no one was looking. Kaylee caught her sniffing her shoe. James saw her eating bits of eraser. Georgio wondered why she talked to her hand. When her teacher noticed her licking and replacing the class' boxed crayons, Marjorie was sent to the school counselor.

104

He never wanted to be a murderer. He never wanted to be a hero. Most people believed him one or the other, but he knew that he was both at the same time. The same "most people" resist the multi-layered approach to humans, preferring them to be "good" or "bad". They, themselves, are on the same scale, assuredly on the side of good. More good than bad. Most people also cannot handle seeing others from different perspectives. Generally, "different perspective" equals "wrong".

Jack was a murderer. Jack was a hero. Jack was good and Jack was bad. Every person's perspective was different and none of them were wrong. Not even Jack himself.

103

It was a hot, bright day and it was noisy with cicadas and lawn mowers. The occasional car roared down the side street, a popular cut-through in the down-turning neighborhood, thumping bass and rattling plastic. An old man groaned to his rat terrier as he shuffled out to his porch across the street, and he sat carefully in one of the molded plastic chairs.

Martin was sipping iced tea on his porch, watching. It felt like a day that something would happen, and although he had felt that way before, he was sure that this was the day. He was right.

102

It was days like this one, ones that woke her, sweating, out of a fitful sleep, that she knew were going to be particularly bad. Moist heat was already rolling in her bedroom window and it squealed when she shut and locked it against the stifling morning. Cara closed all the windows and pulled the drapes. It would do no good if all the cooler night air was wasted in a half-hour of sun-sizzled daylight, the air so thick it felt like she was wearing it like a wetsuit.

101

What is in room 101? A person who has read George Orwell's 1984 knows the answer is "The worst thing in the world." If I were to ask that person what the worst thing in the world is, he or she would most likely answer, "Rats." He or she would be wrong.

The worst thing in the world is sacrificing those you love to save yourself.

I did that. I did the worst thing in the world. I sacrificed everything I ever loved to save myself, and here I am, and here they're not. I wish the worst thing had been rats.

100

They say that because cruise ships are so big you never feel the motion of them on the sea. They are apparently not sensitive enough to that motion. The ships, no matter how large, roll slowly back and forth, up and down. They pull forward. They lag back. The motion never ceases, not even in port. This motion is the clearest when you are in your cabin's bed, tossing because you're rolling. The next clearest is when you try to walk normally down a straight hallway. You can't just step; you must place your steps, and even then you will drift back and forth. The worst, however, will come when you are back on land and you're still rolling. You lie down in your hotel bed, trying to get some sleep before your early morning flight back to the ice and the dark, but you are too dizzy from the rocking, rocking, rocking of the perfectly still bed.

99

Hal dreamed of a woman he didn't recognize. He understood, in his dream, that he knew her. They were in a cemetery on a sunny, fall day. She walked ahead of him and stopped to read a tombstone. She must have read something interesting because she turned to him, pointing. When she knew he was looking at her, she smiled broadly, and Hal smiled, too.

98

Being with others never became easier. They clung. Their smells lingered. Their faces hung behind closed eyes and their voices repeated and repeated. How many people were too many? It would depend on how the gathering went. One perceived misstep could linger, well, forever, as far as Mary knew. There were episodes from her elementary school days that still replayed on bad nights. She was getting better at recognizing when these moments were happening, though she was still powerless to stop them. Mary would know the instant it was over that it was an interaction that would haunt her.

97

Martien awoke slowly. He was dreaming that he was trying to open his eyes, but the light was so bright, he had to keep squeezing them shut again. Try as he might, he couldn't open his eyes. They started to water and Martien began to panic. In his dream, his body suddenly became sluggish. He struggled against growing immobility. His panic increased and he strained to lift even a finger. His chest hurt. He tried to scream and found he couldn't even breathe. Move, move, MOVE! he thought.

Martien convulsed in his bed, scissoring his legs into a tangle of sheets and slapping one arm against his night stand. He gasped like he had been drowning and blinked his streaming eyes against the late morning light coming in from the tall windows. Awake, finally, and knowing this day he would be nagged by the feeling that some wordless thing was wrong, Martien wished that you could go home again.

96

It was a conscious decision, as Frannie believed all her decisions were, to change the face she put out to the world. It had always been her own face, unadorned and unrevealing. As Frannie crossed over the birthday that brought her closer to her own life's end than to the beginning, she first fully acknowledged that she had never been fashionable, and then she decided to remedy the situation, even if only temporarily.

95

The outdoor concert smelled like beer, sweat, perfume, and cigarettes. Occasionally someone steeped in weed wandered by, but the security cracked down on that hard, so it wasn't much of a problem for Julia who was surrounded by bodies. Slowly but surely she was moving closer to the stage.

It was a small city, but they had managed to get some formerly big names to do their Friday night concerts. Everyone came out, though for different reasons. Most came out no matter who was performing. Julia knew anyone under the age of thirty attending this concert was here to find their friends and to be seen. A great many came just to drink and ogle the teen girls. Around the outskirts were the very old and the infirm, bobbing their heads and being grateful they weren't indoors on such a nice night.

Julia, and most of the people down in front, were actually here to see the band. A fifty-something lady dressed head to toe in jeans was screaming the words and swaying, hands in the air, her eyes locked on the lead singer. Whenever he appeared to look her way, the lady would wave two thumbs up, hoping she had been seen. Julia stepped around the woman into the red light bathing the first fifteen feet of the crowd.

Even after more than twenty years since this band had filled any auditorium, it was still a dream of most of the older women, and a great many of the men, in this audience to be noticed. To be tapped on the shoulders and have a backstage pass pressed into their hands. To be asked to stay after the concert because the lead singer wanted to see you, personally.

Julia swung around a grey-haired man with a goatee who was boogieing down despite his ample beer belly. The band was just crashing through the final chords of one of their best remembered classics. The singer conducted the drummer's crashes, pumping his fist again, again and again before spinning to face audience, triumphant and beaming. The crowd screamed and hooted and waved. Julia pictured the fifty-something woman, her red-rimmed mouth open and thumbs thrusting to the sky.

The singer grabbed his microphone with his left hand and looked out, then down. His wide smile faltered as his eyes caught those of Julia, surrounded yet somehow alone, bathed in light from the stage.