skonen_blades

The cops kick in the door.

There’s a punch as he picks up the thread. Oil on the floor. Broken lights. It’s the teeth of a shattered window and a dog barking. Seasons whip by for a few minutes and repairs accrete in time-lapse perfection like stalagmites building on the floor of a cave. The concrete stairs become butter melting in the sun as generations of feet wear their middles down. Air brakes hiss. The sun slows to a stop. The light angling into the basement stops cutting across the garish carpet.

The whistling-kettle scream of passing time jumps off the trampoline, eases back on the throttle, and begins to scab over. It starts passing at the rate it’s more accustomed to.

An ant crawls over his shoe. It turns to ash before it makes it to the other side.

He’s still temperoactive. He needs to stand still where he is for a while until the waves coalesce and reality forgets that he’s from hundreds of years ago. A little agreement between the ions and particles of his body with the quantum noise levels of this particular now.

It takes about half an hour.

Until that point, he’s a King Midas with the power to unhinge whatever he touches from time. His footprints permanently rot the carpet with a couple of size ten quotation marks made of dust and mould.

His eyes see badly cut frames of a few days back or forward as his reality oscillates to a stop like a knife thrown deep into a target. It’s an odd side-effect that has the benefit of letting get a few hints as to what kind of traffic is going through his landing pad with a few The carousel is slowing down to a stop.

When he’s sure, he takes a step forward. This is his hideout. If they know he’s jumping again, it’ll take a while before they know when he is. They’ll know where, though, and that makes this place unsafe.

It was sheer lunacy of him to make a random, unregistered, and variable jump like that but he panicked.

It’s silent outside which is odd for noontime Chicago.




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The lab was top secret. The sub basement had many levels of security. It was five clearance protocols above the office of the President. It was assembled in secret by technicians who each worked on a small piece of it and were not informed about the others. To tell the truth, there were sixteen people on the entire planet who know of its existence. There were ten scientists who worked on the experiment. There were three test subjects. There were two agency heads that authorized it.

There was one more person that knew about it and he was the one who organized it all. He was standing in the green glow of the control panel looking down at them when it happened. He was the head of black ops. He knew more about national security than anyone else alive. He was gazing down at the subjects deep in their sleep cycle. He was a tall man with white hair and long precise nails. He was pale skinned from so much work in the shadows. His post and his division didn’t actually exist and all of his operations were off the books. He lived in the margins. He lived off a percentage of the national surplus. His operations were written off. He was the unconscious mind of the US of A. He was the lizard brain lying at the base of it. His job was to come up with the means to protect the nation from hypothetical scenarios. He conjured up conjectures and possible threats and then came up with ways to defeat those ideas.

His name was Easter Standing.

The year was 1889.

I remember it well. That’s the way I was designed. Total recall. It’s a bitch when you’re as old as I am. Going into 2010, I realized that being 121 years old isn’t that big of a deal if you still look like a super fit thirty year old. I think back to the day of my birth and the day of Easter’s death.

I remember opening up my eyes and seeing Easter looking down at me from behind the glass. You have to remember that this was a long time ago and we didn’t have the same technology. We had primitive pheromone detectors at the doorways and security cards with holes punched in them that were changed every day. The metal was mostly copper and brass. Some of the power was provided by steam and coal.

Most of the power, though, was provided by the hydroelectric dam that we lived under. A whole city’s worth of energy diverted solely for our use. This experimental sub station was set up underneath a large lake created by the dam. Underneath water and a mile of earth we slept. Lightning rods were set up and connected to huge batteries underneath us. Geothermal rods led into them as well.

All for me and my sisters.

My name is Falayla. My sister’s names were Doreen and Lektrinka. We were super heroes born in the late 1800s. We were created to combat enemies of national security. What can I say?

Easter was standing over us to supervise our execution. He was livid. He knew that he had created beings that he would never able to control effectively. He was watching one of his best ideas getting crumpled up and thrown away. The trouble with Easter is that he was too good. He had great ideas that didn’t always fit in with the inherent limitations that humanity gives him.

He had the technicians put us down.

I woke up just as my second sister died. We were linked in the mindspace. When I was alone there in that other place, I woke up out of curiousity to see where the minds of my sisters had gone. That simple thing. If they hadn’t tried to do us one at a time, they would have succeeded.

I saw Easter’s eyes widen when he saw that I was awake. I saw the technician standing beside me with a large brass syringe. There was a moment where it all became clear what was happening when I saw the open vacant eyes of my sisters.

It’s all a blur after that. Doreen was a teleporter. Her code name was Door. Lektrinka could manipulate electricity. Her code name was Lectric. I could make my body diamond hard and extend unbreakable tendrils out from my body. My code name was Flay. All of us could fly.

The technician beside me lunged for my arm. He disappeared in a mist of blood as the hairs on my arm shot out, tangled around him and convulsed. I cut my self free of my bonds and shredded my way through the rest of the scientists. I picked up the bodies of my sisters and left Easter standing behind the glass. I think he was smiling. At least he got to see his handiwork in action before he died.

I flew up through the ceiling and further up through the dirt and into the bottom of the lake. I broke through the lake bed and went up through the water. The lake rushed down into the hole I had just made. The water reacted with the coal engines and overloaded the steam pipes. Anyone who wasn’t lucky enough to be cooked was crushed and drowned.

The vortex that formed like water going down a bath drain was what I had to fight against flying up through the water. I was strong and invulnerable but I still had to breathe. It was a two full minutes before I burst out of the whirpool on the surface of the lake in a geyser of steam, carrying my dead sisters and screaming like some sort of born again phoenix mermaid siren.

I flew over to the bank and took giant gasps of air and watched the water level of the lake go down a few inches and then calm down over the next twenty minutes. I buried my sisters.

That was a long time ago. It bothers me that I never saw Easter die. That was some pretty thick glass he was standing behind.

There’s a knock at my door.





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