One Year After The Eastwood Event
The spider remained perfectly still, a patient cold-blooded killer. In an incomprehensible flash, the fishing spider skated across the water and darted a hooked leg under the surface—grabbing its prey for a paralyzing bite.
The frog didn’t stand a chance.
Daniel watched, morbidly fascinated, as the spider sucked the guts out of the captured animal. The narrator prattled on about digestive enzymes and scientific names, but the boy’s mind boggled over the fact there was a spider that ate frogs.
His early attraction to nature shows and documentaries continued to flourish while his horizons gradually broadened. Mary supported his hunger for knowledge from the beginning, giving him the tools to teach himself about the world through educational programs. Dr. Adelaide forced him to learn history and geography, but it never held his interest long. It didn’t seem important, somehow.
Humanities and Mythology excited him more, as art was timeless. Math was never easy with Mary always keeping the work one step beyond comfortable. Again, his interests lay elsewhere.
In his ample free time, he watched TV.
Daniel loved cartoons about kids his age. Kids on adventures, kids with supernatural abilities, even normal shows about middle school fascinated him. He’d never imagined so many different kinds of people while stuck in his room. Many of his favorite shows involved science fiction and fantasy but, no matter what he watched, Daniel never saw anything quite like himself. Which made him wonder…
What, exactly, am I?
Was he a mutant? A science experiment gone wrong? A superhero in the making? The cursed prince of an enchanted kingdom? So many types of stories and he had no idea where he fitted.
Nearly time for a visit. He checked the clock—Yes. Daniel paused the documentary with a wave of his hand and sat up from his bed of sand. He didn’t brush himself off; the grains of sand stuck to him would slowly disintegrate regardless. Someone knocked at the door. Mary.
“Come in,” he said. A buzzer sounded, the red light changed to green, and the bolt retracted. Dr. Adelaide wore her hazard suit with a card table under her arm, a camping chair strapped over her shoulder, and a bag in her other hand. After setting down the bag and opening the chair, she unfolded the legs of the table to anchor them in the sand.
Mary approached the corner of his room where Daniel kept all his precious things. A colorful arrangement of blown glass curled through the air, tearing at it like claws or horns. She lit ‘coconut’ and ‘chocolate’ from the set of scented candles he’d been gifted with a pocket lighter. Smelling their combined aroma was the closest he’d come to tasting the flavors. Mary tapped the needle of the metronome, making it sway left and right—symmetric, balanced, and constant. Tic… Tic… Tic…
Daniel buried his anticipation, but it leaked into a smile. He slipped on a disposable latex glove—each lasted about twelve seconds—to twist the knob of an ancient-looking analog radio and bring a song decades out of fashion crooning to life. Mary flicked on his plasma globe and glowing strands scattered randomly through their container as if blown by an errant breeze.
Finally, she brought out his present. Mary planted the brass hourglass in the sand with a flourish. Suspended by twining wires, the trinket was easily flippable. Half an hour’s worth of sand trickled between two glass globes. “What do you think?” she asked.
He submerged himself in the details, memorizing the contours and colors, imagining what it would feel like against his skin. He wrapped his mind around the brass, appreciating its metallic sheen, and listened to the tiny grains as they fell.
Daniel loved the way the different scents of the dollar-store candles played together. The old songs on the radio—even the boring ones—were wonderful to his ears. Every gift from her was a treasure.
“Thank you.”
Mary took off her helmet, “Oh, you’re welcome,” she said as she struggled out of her hazard suit. He could smell pepperoni on her breath. She’d been eating pizza.
“Mary,” he said, “Why don’t you eat anything when you visit me?”
An expression of surprise and embarrassment crossed Dr. Adelaide’s face, “I didn’t want to offend you. Wouldn’t that be a reminder of your… condition?”
“No.” He shook his head, “No, it wouldn’t bother me.”
Dr. Adelaide sat across the table from him, “Why the sudden interest?”
“It’s nothing.”
“Daniel, you can tell me.”
He hesitated, searching for the right words, “I want to see you happy.”
“Happy?”
“The people, when they eat together, they seem happy.”
“In the commercials?” She always understood him. He nodded. “I see. Tomorrow we can have lunch together.” He smiled. “Now come here, we’re tackling an old problem.”
“No tests today?” Daniel asked as he approached the table.
“No tests, Daniel, but this is important,” she brought something glinting out of the bag.
He realized what was going on, “My abilities don’t work on gold.”
Dr. Adelaide grinned, “I have a theory. You can’t destroy gold—because you don’t want to.”
That made Daniel frown, “What does it say about me that I won’t ruin gold but have no problem spoiling my food?”
She explained her idea, “At first, I thought, ‘Gold is a very non-reactive metal, it shouldn’t be a surprise it’s more resistant to Daniel’s ability than other materials.’ However, your ability doesn’t work through any chemistry I can identify—it’s closer to spontaneous nuclear decay… though we don’t know where the released energy goes—so the idea atomic number seventy-nine should be an obstacle for you is highly suspect. You can affect whatever you want, including gold.”
“Why would I want to?” He twisted the ring with unreadable words on his finger, “Gold is shiny, and soft, and smooth, and it’s wonderful. Why should I add one more to the list of things I can’t touch?”
Mary gave him the Look, which she reserved for when he wasn’t getting it. “The gold is not the issue here. The issue is you, Daniel.” She shifted from excited scientist to concerned guardian in a second, “You can’t stay in this room forever. One day, your capacity to control your ability will be the difference between saving what you want to protect and destroying it. Without that control, you’ll never be whole.”
Daniel saw her side and accepted her reasoning. “Okay.” He reached over and pressed his index finger into the gold coin, squinting his eyes shut. After a few seconds of nothing happening, the two of them realized there was a problem. He sighed and sat back, “No matter the reason, how can I choose to ruin something I like?”
“Part of growing up is learning to make decisions. To make good decisions, you need to frame them properly. To frame them properly, you need a clear head, knowledge of the situation, an understanding of the consequences, and the wisdom to judge the value of things.”
“What if I’m wrong?” He stared at the gold again, “What if I destroy something I can’t get back?”
“Yes, that happens. Decisions are rarely easy. Daniel, I won’t force you to use your ability by making you angry; that would make you reckless with it. I won’t trick you into using your ability; that would make you resent both it and yourself. Instead, I’m giving you a choice.” Dr. Adelaide pushed the little gold coin towards him. Confused, Daniel looked from the gold to Mary and back again.
“It’s yours now,” she said. “When I leave today, I won’t be taking it back.” Daniel smiled, picked up the coin, and handled it fondly. “However, you have to decide what is more important—an ounce of gold or learning control.”
The smile fell away. He put the coin back on the table and regarded it with a hard gaze, contemplating.
“Daniel, I’m hoping that if you learn complete control you can learn how to hold back your ability. Maybe developing self-control will let you touch things without destroying them.”
He stood there, contemplating. I could give Mary a real hug.
Mary leaned in to say in a low voice, “Let me tell you a secret about choices, Daniel. Don’t look back. When you decide, give it everything you have.”
Daniel took his finger and pressed it to the golden coin resting on the table. When he made his choice, all doubts dissolved in a moment of clarity where he knew nothing but the doing. His ability yanked power out of him like a loose baby tooth.
The gold coin dusted instantly, the destructive burst of Ruin taking a large chunk of the card table with it in a shower of brittle crumbling plastic. The table snapped in half and the pieces collapsed in on themselves. Dust danced in an intangible wind, never settling, and faded from reality.
Shocked by the destruction, Dr. Adelaide gasped and knocked back her chair as she stood. In the aftermath, Daniel experienced a surge of conflicting emotions.
The intercom buzzer sounded, snapping Mary out of trancelike awe. She rushed to hit the button, “Everything’s fine, I instructed UE 007 to destroy the table… though I am requesting another table now to continue experimentation.” She released the button, exhaled deeply, and faced him.
“I’ve failed,” he pointed to the broken table, “I want the coin back.”
Mary righted her chair. “We need to talk about this.”
He nodded and sat in the soft, powdery sand as two men in hazmat suits collected the table fragments and set up a new one while Mary filled out a small tower of paperwork. Daniel stood when they were alone, and Mary set the chessboard. She moved first. “I want you to know, you didn’t fail in any measure of the word. Nobody was hurt, nothing irreplaceable was lost, and you learned something about yourself in the process.”
He couldn’t play right now. “I don’t feel like I’ve learned anything.”
“Daniel, don’t disregard what you felt or what insights you had. Examine each one closely. Hypothesize, test, and analyze. Tell me what happened.”
“When I broke the table, I was afraid you’d be mad at me,” he shook his head, “More than that—I was ashamed my attempt to learn control went out of control.”
“You know you’re more important to me than any table,” she said.
“I might’ve hurt you. If I’d done that, I couldn’t forgive myself.”
“But you didn’t hurt me, and now you know better. When you use your abilities, you need to err on the side of caution. You’ll have to be careful around other people, but I know you can do it.”
He was glad of her praise, but something bothered him, “When I ruined the coin, a part of me resented the gold for resisting my power. Isn’t that weird? The worst part of me has this sense of pride in itself for being, basically, terrible.”
She nodded, “We all take pride in our abilities; that’s understandable and natural. You might feel the same way about being the best shot with a bow or gun if that was your talent.”
That was somewhat comforting. “I think I’m ashamed because I enjoyed destroying the gold almost as much as I enjoyed having it.”
“An act of destruction isn’t necessarily evil in and of itself, though it takes wisdom to know what should be destroyed… Something in your way, something precious that needs to be sacrificed, or something in yourself. Daniel, you can use your abilities to bring good to the world, I know it.”
“If I learn control. If I can choose wisely. If I know right from wrong. None of that’s easy.”
“No, they’re not. You need help; that’s why I’m here. Now, make your move.”
He’d stalled long enough. Soon the board advanced to middlegame and Daniel was faced with endless possibilities—all of which seemed hopeless. It was a familiar setting when playing with Mary and he’d yet to get past this stage, but this time he saw something new.
When playing chess, Daniel held onto his pieces as long as possible. Dr. Adelaide’s brutal style made loss inevitable, but he’d never strategically ‘sacrificed’ a piece. Yet, now, he saw it—a way through her defenses to win. Daniel set a trap by exposing his queen. Mary, quick as ever, took a second to snatch up his piece and a second longer to realize what he’d done. He saw her smile. She’d underestimated him. In four moves, he won the game.
“That’s checkmate. I won. I actually won!”
“Congratulations on your first win. I’ve been waiting for this day since we started.” He was bursting with pleasure and pride at the praise but, of course, she wasn’t done, “You could have won by moving the knight here instead, you know. You didn’t need to sacrifice the queen, though victory would have been more difficult. The best tacticians win efficiently and spare their troops.” She packed up and began to leave, “I look forward to our next game.”
One Year After The Eastwood Event
The spider remained perfectly still, a patient cold-blooded killer. In an incomprehensible flash, the fishing spider skated across the water and darted a hooked leg under the surface—grabbing its prey for a paralyzing bite.
The frog didn’t stand a chance.
Daniel watched, morbidly fascinated, as the spider sucked the guts out of the captured animal. The narrator prattled on about digestive enzymes and scientific names, but the boy’s mind boggled over the fact there was a spider that ate frogs.
His early attraction to nature shows and documentaries continued to flourish while his horizons gradually broadened. Mary supported his hunger for knowledge from the beginning, giving him the tools to teach himself about the world through educational programs. Dr. Adelaide forced him to learn history and geography, but it never held his interest long. It didn’t seem important, somehow.
Humanities and Mythology excited him more, as art was timeless. Math was never easy with Mary always keeping the work one step beyond comfortable. Again, his interests lay elsewhere.
In his ample free time, he watched TV.
Daniel loved cartoons about kids his age. Kids on adventures, kids with supernatural abilities, even normal shows about middle school fascinated him. He’d never imagined so many different kinds of people while stuck in his room. Many of his favorite shows involved science fiction and fantasy but, no matter what he watched, Daniel never saw anything quite like himself. Which made him wonder…
What, exactly, am I?
Was he a mutant? A science experiment gone wrong? A superhero in the making? The cursed prince of an enchanted kingdom? So many types of stories and he had no idea where he fitted.
Nearly time for a visit. He checked the clock—Yes. Daniel paused the documentary with a wave of his hand and sat up from his bed of sand. He didn’t brush himself off; the grains of sand stuck to him would slowly disintegrate regardless. Someone knocked at the door. Mary.
“Come in,” he said. A buzzer sounded, the red light changed to green, and the bolt retracted. Dr. Adelaide wore her hazard suit with a card table under her arm, a camping chair strapped over her shoulder, and a bag in her other hand. After setting down the bag and opening the chair, she unfolded the legs of the table to anchor them in the sand.
Mary approached the corner of his room where Daniel kept all his precious things. A colorful arrangement of blown glass curled through the air, tearing at it like claws or horns. She lit ‘coconut’ and ‘chocolate’ from the set of scented candles he’d been gifted with a pocket lighter. Smelling their combined aroma was the closest he’d come to tasting the flavors. Mary tapped the needle of the metronome, making it sway left and right—symmetric, balanced, and constant. Tic… Tic… Tic…
Daniel buried his anticipation, but it leaked into a smile. He slipped on a disposable latex glove—each lasted about twelve seconds—to twist the knob of an ancient-looking analog radio and bring a song decades out of fashion crooning to life. Mary flicked on his plasma globe and glowing strands scattered randomly through their container as if blown by an errant breeze.
Finally, she brought out his present. Mary planted the brass hourglass in the sand with a flourish. Suspended by twining wires, the trinket was easily flippable. Half an hour’s worth of sand trickled between two glass globes. “What do you think?” she asked.
He submerged himself in the details, memorizing the contours and colors, imagining what it would feel like against his skin. He wrapped his mind around the brass, appreciating its metallic sheen, and listened to the tiny grains as they fell.
Daniel loved the way the different scents of the dollar-store candles played together. The old songs on the radio—even the boring ones—were wonderful to his ears. Every gift from her was a treasure.
“Thank you.”
Mary took off her helmet, “Oh, you’re welcome,” she said as she struggled out of her hazard suit. He could smell pepperoni on her breath. She’d been eating pizza.
“Mary,” he said, “Why don’t you eat anything when you visit me?”
An expression of surprise and embarrassment crossed Dr. Adelaide’s face, “I didn’t want to offend you. Wouldn’t that be a reminder of your… condition?”
“No.” He shook his head, “No, it wouldn’t bother me.”
Dr. Adelaide sat across the table from him, “Why the sudden interest?”
“It’s nothing.”
“Daniel, you can tell me.”
He hesitated, searching for the right words, “I want to see you happy.”
“Happy?”
“The people, when they eat together, they seem happy.”
“In the commercials?” She always understood him. He nodded. “I see. Tomorrow we can have lunch together.” He smiled. “Now come here, we’re tackling an old problem.”
“No tests today?” Daniel asked as he approached the table.
“No tests, Daniel, but this is important,” she brought something glinting out of the bag.
He realized what was going on, “My abilities don’t work on gold.”
Dr. Adelaide grinned, “I have a theory. You can’t destroy gold—because you don’t want to.”
That made Daniel frown, “What does it say about me that I won’t ruin gold but have no problem spoiling my food?”
She explained her idea, “At first, I thought, ‘Gold is a very non-reactive metal, it shouldn’t be a surprise it’s more resistant to Daniel’s ability than other materials.’ However, your ability doesn’t work through any chemistry I can identify—it’s closer to spontaneous nuclear decay… though we don’t know where the released energy goes—so the idea atomic number seventy-nine should be an obstacle for you is highly suspect. You can affect whatever you want, including gold.”
“Why would I want to?” He twisted the ring with unreadable words on his finger, “Gold is shiny, and soft, and smooth, and it’s wonderful. Why should I add one more to the list of things I can’t touch?”
Mary gave him the Look, which she reserved for when he wasn’t getting it. “The gold is not the issue here. The issue is you, Daniel.” She shifted from excited scientist to concerned guardian in a second, “You can’t stay in this room forever. One day, your capacity to control your ability will be the difference between saving what you want to protect and destroying it. Without that control, you’ll never be whole.”
Daniel saw her side and accepted her reasoning. “Okay.” He reached over and pressed his index finger into the gold coin, squinting his eyes shut. After a few seconds of nothing happening, the two of them realized there was a problem. He sighed and sat back, “No matter the reason, how can I choose to ruin something I like?”
“Part of growing up is learning to make decisions. To make good decisions, you need to frame them properly. To frame them properly, you need a clear head, knowledge of the situation, an understanding of the consequences, and the wisdom to judge the value of things.”
“What if I’m wrong?” He stared at the gold again, “What if I destroy something I can’t get back?”
“Yes, that happens. Decisions are rarely easy. Daniel, I won’t force you to use your ability by making you angry; that would make you reckless with it. I won’t trick you into using your ability; that would make you resent both it and yourself. Instead, I’m giving you a choice.” Dr. Adelaide pushed the little gold coin towards him. Confused, Daniel looked from the gold to Mary and back again.
“It’s yours now,” she said. “When I leave today, I won’t be taking it back.” Daniel smiled, picked up the coin, and handled it fondly. “However, you have to decide what is more important—an ounce of gold or learning control.”
The smile fell away. He put the coin back on the table and regarded it with a hard gaze, contemplating.
“Daniel, I’m hoping that if you learn complete control you can learn how to hold back your ability. Maybe developing self-control will let you touch things without destroying them.”
He stood there, contemplating. I could give Mary a real hug.
Mary leaned in to say in a low voice, “Let me tell you a secret about choices, Daniel. Don’t look back. When you decide, give it everything you have.”
Daniel took his finger and pressed it to the golden coin resting on the table. When he made his choice, all doubts dissolved in a moment of clarity where he knew nothing but the doing. His ability yanked power out of him like a loose baby tooth.
The gold coin dusted instantly, the destructive burst of Ruin taking a large chunk of the card table with it in a shower of brittle crumbling plastic. The table snapped in half and the pieces collapsed in on themselves. Dust danced in an intangible wind, never settling, and faded from reality.
Shocked by the destruction, Dr. Adelaide gasped and knocked back her chair as she stood. In the aftermath, Daniel experienced a surge of conflicting emotions.
The intercom buzzer sounded, snapping Mary out of trancelike awe. She rushed to hit the button, “Everything’s fine, I instructed UE 007 to destroy the table… though I am requesting another table now to continue experimentation.” She released the button, exhaled deeply, and faced him.
“I’ve failed,” he pointed to the broken table, “I want the coin back.”
Mary righted her chair. “We need to talk about this.”
He nodded and sat in the soft, powdery sand as two men in hazmat suits collected the table fragments and set up a new one while Mary filled out a small tower of paperwork. Daniel stood when they were alone, and Mary set the chessboard. She moved first. “I want you to know, you didn’t fail in any measure of the word. Nobody was hurt, nothing irreplaceable was lost, and you learned something about yourself in the process.”
He couldn’t play right now. “I don’t feel like I’ve learned anything.”
“Daniel, don’t disregard what you felt or what insights you had. Examine each one closely. Hypothesize, test, and analyze. Tell me what happened.”
“When I broke the table, I was afraid you’d be mad at me,” he shook his head, “More than that—I was ashamed my attempt to learn control went out of control.”
“You know you’re more important to me than any table,” she said.
“I might’ve hurt you. If I’d done that, I couldn’t forgive myself.”
“But you didn’t hurt me, and now you know better. When you use your abilities, you need to err on the side of caution. You’ll have to be careful around other people, but I know you can do it.”
He was glad of her praise, but something bothered him, “When I ruined the coin, a part of me resented the gold for resisting my power. Isn’t that weird? The worst part of me has this sense of pride in itself for being, basically, terrible.”
She nodded, “We all take pride in our abilities; that’s understandable and natural. You might feel the same way about being the best shot with a bow or gun if that was your talent.”
That was somewhat comforting. “I think I’m ashamed because I enjoyed destroying the gold almost as much as I enjoyed having it.”
“An act of destruction isn’t necessarily evil in and of itself, though it takes wisdom to know what should be destroyed… Something in your way, something precious that needs to be sacrificed, or something in yourself. Daniel, you can use your abilities to bring good to the world, I know it.”
“If I learn control. If I can choose wisely. If I know right from wrong. None of that’s easy.”
“No, they’re not. You need help; that’s why I’m here. Now, make your move.”
He’d stalled long enough. Soon the board advanced to middlegame and Daniel was faced with endless possibilities—all of which seemed hopeless. It was a familiar setting when playing with Mary and he’d yet to get past this stage, but this time he saw something new.
When playing chess, Daniel held onto his pieces as long as possible. Dr. Adelaide’s brutal style made loss inevitable, but he’d never strategically ‘sacrificed’ a piece. Yet, now, he saw it—a way through her defenses to win. Daniel set a trap by exposing his queen. Mary, quick as ever, took a second to snatch up his piece and a second longer to realize what he’d done. He saw her smile. She’d underestimated him. In four moves, he won the game.
“That’s checkmate. I won. I actually won!”
“Congratulations on your first win. I’ve been waiting for this day since we started.” He was bursting with pleasure and pride at the praise but, of course, she wasn’t done, “You could have won by moving the knight here instead, you know. You didn’t need to sacrifice the queen, though victory would have been more difficult. The best tacticians win efficiently and spare their troops.” She packed up and began to leave, “I look forward to our next game.”
