Title: The Distorting Medium

Author:

Updated: March 1, 2009


It's not that I hate people, or that their company is unpleasant. Well, not entirely. I do hate some people, and they deserve it. But that's not the point. I enjoyed being with people at one time. I never went out of my way, to seek or to avoid them. I wasn't some insipid social butterfly or anything, the important thing is that I never hated people as a whole until They hated Me.

Then I burned the kitchen counter while helping Mum to make dinner. It's anticlimactic if you're looking for one of the ultimate turning points of my life, but I've found that more often than not, that's how life is.

Mum was home for the first time that whole week, and to make up for leaving her fifteen year old son all on his own she decided to make my favorite meal, short ribs roasted slowly in a big pot full of carrots, beans, potatoes, and parsnips.

It's not like I wasn't perfectly self-sufficient at that point in my life. Mum had always been darting out of the house on some important mission or other, but every time she darted back in she felt bad about leaving me, and I didn't mind letting her 'make up for it.'

So we were in the kitchen together, cooking my favorite meal. Mum had about a million things going on at once, the way she always does. The rice was pouring itself into the new automatic rice cooker that I'd bought for her birthday, the bean cans were popping open and emptying their pale guts into the pot that was loading itself into the oven, and Mum was ransacking the cabinets looking fro a new jar of salad dressing.

I was adding the cheese and croutons to the salad, but was thinking more about the conversation Mum and I were having. I'd decided, as per standard procedure, to take advantage of her self induced guilt trip, and had finally started the conversation that I'd been rehearsing for the past week.

I wanted to join the High School baseball team.

This shouldn't be a problem, except that Mum had developed a vendetta against the sport, and had decided that I would never play again.

But I'd thought over my argument carefully, and had my points and counterpoints lined out and well rehearsed. I had a chance to be on the team this year, and I was going to do it.

The argument was turning in my favor, I could see Mum loosing steam and grasping at weak excuses. There was still the remote chance that she could say no anyways, but I was giving as good as I got.

I was so animated in my arguments, I felt as though I would burst out of my skin. I shifted from foot to foot to try to release some of that energy, I tapped my fingers against the counter but it didn't really do much good. My blood was racing through my veins and my arms began to prickle strangely.

Even now I'm not sure how to describe the sensation. Suffice it to say that the wooden spoon that I had been holding burst into quick, hot flame, wilted the salad, and fell with an ominous finality upon the counter.

We stood for a long time, watching the spoon smolder.

All I could think was that there was absolutely no way she would ever let me be on the team now.

Mum didn't really know what to do after that. She'd always hoped that I'd be a telekinetic like her, but by the time I'd entered Junior High without showing any manifestations of powers she'd resigned herself to the fact that I would go through life as a citizen. She'd accepted that, and come to terms with it.

Neither of us had ever dared to consider that I would inherit my father's powers. The implications were too big. I used to dream about being a pyro, throwing glaring comets with the sinuous grace my father exuded. But those dreams burned with the Maxville capitol building.

She didn't know what to do, so she went back to the office, saying that she'd forgotten something important. I didn't blame her, because I wanted to hide too. So I sat down at the table and ate my favorite meal alone.

Short ribs always tasted bitter to me after that.

Mum came home later that evening and we both ghosted through the house, not avoiding each other exactly, but moving as though we were two magnets with the same charge.

I went to sleep, and Mum stood in the kitchen, looking at the spoon and crying.


The next day Mum was gone when I woke up, there was a post-it on my door frame explaining that something at the office had come up and that she wouldn't be home until late. The cremated spoon was gone from the counter, the dark black singe mark its sole monument.

That Friday, for the first time in many years, I cut school. I hadn't done that since my Dad went to jail. I used to cut school a lot to hang out with him, to play baseball in the park a few blocks from our house, and even though Mum said I shouldn't be missing so much class, he would make sure that I never got in trouble.

Once he was arrested I stopped cutting school because I didn't feel like I had anything to do besides feel lonely. Mum didn't seem like she would have been able to handle any more trouble either.

But today I laced up my mud stained shoes, and shrugged into my worn jacket. I left my backpack and textbooks sitting by the stairs and headed out the door into the early spring air. I looked around for a bit, up and down our shabby yet respectable street as though I wasn't too sure where I was going.

I did know where I was going, but I wasn't sure how to start. So I stood on the chipped sidewalk, and looked around.

Our street wasn't prosperous exactly, but the people did the best they could. It was a street of people who were either starting their families and old couples with their families grown and gone. I was the oldest kid on our street. The next oldest being Amy, who was six. Mum and Dad came here to start our family, and we're still frozen here. We're waiting for him to come back so that our family can resume.

I stuffed my hands in my pockets and turned down the street, kicking the withered leaves that had escaped last autumn's rakes away with absent minded resentment. I continued on in a defensive slump, suddenly feeling as if the world looked at me and disapproved.

I tried not to worry about what Mum would think, or what I would tell her, but suddenly nothing seemed as important anymore, and it was a long walk. So I imagined how our next conversation might go, and shivered from an internal cold.

All of the volatile excitement from yesterday had left me, and I slouched along as though hoping that the gazes of other early morning wanderers would slide off my rounded back.

By the time I reached the buss stop my cheeks were smarting and my nose was running as though it thought it had been entered in a race. My stomach rumbled as I collapsed in a window seat near the back of the bus and tried to look inconspicuous.

I got off at the other side of town, as far West as the busses ran, and followed my shrinking shadow down the ragged edge of the highway. I almost missed the dirt road leading off into an obscure canyon, but then it was meant to be missed and I had only ever been here once before.

I complied placidly with the security guards that met me after several hundred yards and twisting bends in the rough dirt path, and they walked the last little stretch with me. I told them who I was and who I had come to see, and after filling out several forms I changed into the sweat pants and tee shirt that they provided for me, and shuffled out in the hard bottomed slippers. I passed through a series of machines designed to detect the innumerable contraband items in Maxville Maximum Security Detention Centre, and was admitted to see my father.


I sat gingerly in the little plastic chair and waited for my Dad to be shown in. The room was small, but not gloomy. Well lit, but not blindingly bright either. If I had been able to leave my nervousness behind me it would have actually been a fairly pleasant room, with two chairs, two doors, and one table.

My heart was beating in my throat, and the air felt like it was filled with soup. Perhaps split pea; that was my Dad's favorite, thick and grainy with large, tender chunks of smoked ham. We hadn't had it in years; I wonder if they serve it here?

My nervously rambling thoughts were interrupted when the door across from me opened. I stood awkwardly, not really sure what to do with my hands, or the rest of myself for that matter. Three figures entered, two guards flanking an unfamiliar shape.

It was slumped, much as I had been on my trip here, his shaggy black hair falling into his eyes. He looked up at the noise my chair made when I stood.

For one terrifying moment, I thought that they had brought the wrong man in. The face was so haggard and solemn. Then he smiled, and his face creased in its old familiar way, and I was looking at my Dad after eight long years. He laughed and strode around the table, swinging me up in one of his wonderful, unrestrained hugs. I was swept back to those afternoons in the park, all the more sweet because they were stolen, and all the more precious because they were gone.

Discarding every scrap of dignity that my advanced age demanded, I returned his hug as fiercely as I could, feeling as though everything would be fine again. Then he sighed, the big earth rumbling sigh that echoed as though from deep subterranean caves filled with crystal, and gently pulled away.

"Hey," I said, my voice squeaking and uncertain.

"Hey," he said back, in his velvet thunder voice, and I was reminded of winter evenings huddled under blanket cities.

"I set Mum's spoon on fire. The one you bought for her at the fair." I said, regretfully disentangling myself from him to salvage at least a remnant of my dignity. It was strange, to see him again, and I wanted to fall back into our old camaraderie, but at the same time felt that I should keep this stranger at arms length.

I knew that he'd done bad things, that people hated and feared him and that Mum cried nearly every night for years. But in that moment, all I could see in him was my Dad, the guy I played baseball with, who was just as scared of heights as I was, and who could make anything better.

"I see." He rumbled again, folding his arms pensively as his warm smoky scent folded around me like a sunny autumn day. He always smelled like apple wood smoke. There were new, desolate elements to his scent now, metal and sanitizers, harsh chemicals. I ignored these new intruders and filled my mind with his sweet smell.

"I don't know what to do." I whispered, examining my shoes.

"It's okay." He murmured, reaching out and running his strong fingers through my hair and brushing the niggling doubts and raging fears from my mind with each smooth, confident stroke.

"I don't even know how I did it. On minute we were talking and the next I'd flambéed the salad." I choked into him, finally letting all of my confusion and fear bleed through the tight wraps I'd put on them, because I knew he's be able to wash away the stains. This was easily the most vulnerable that I'd allowed myself to be in years.

"Were you excited?" He said, his eyes glazing over and looking far back, "Like you couldn't hold still; had to let all the energy out or you'd shake yourself to pieces?"

"Yeah," I said, looking up and dislodging his rhythmic fingers, "Is that how it feels when you power up?"

"No. Only the first time." He said, ruffling my hair and swinging the chair round the table so that we could sit together, "That's how it feels the first time all pyrokinetics power up. While or powers develop, they store energy, and when the energy reaches some arbitrary level it's concentrated and pushed from the body as flame."

"So…how do you make it happen?" I asked.

Dad got this far off look in his eyes, and nibbled on the edge of his lip the way he used to when we'd get to the grocery store and discover that we'd forgotten the list and would have to wing it.

"It…feels like…when you take a big gulp of a warm drink on a cold day and you can feel it move down to your stomach and settle. It's like that, warm and heavy, somewhere in the center of you." He said finally.

I tried to feel where he was talking about, but all I felt were the vibrations of my hungry stomach. "I can't find it," I muttered distractedly, still casting around for it with my eyes closed.

"It's hard to find it the first couple times, but it gets easier and easier until you don't really need to think about it." Dad said, his chair creaking as he rocked back on it, "Instead of concentrating on specific places try to spread your mind out until you're aware of your entire torso, and look for warm spots. My power is focused in my abdomen, but it's slightly different for everyone."

I opened on eye and looked at him, wondering if he was just messing with me. 'Spread my mind'? Really. But he just grinned back and winked at me, and so I closed my eyes again and tried to imagine my mind as a slab of margarine.

Dad was always at his most serious when his eyes were laughing at you.

The hunger must have been more serious than I'd thought, because after a while I did feel like there was an area just under my sternum that was warmer than it should be.

"Okay, so what do I do when I find a warm spot?" I asked, still the slightest bit skeptical.

"Well, that's the question. I just sort of prod it, but there was a guy in my senior year who said that he had to drag it to his arms, and another that had to give it mental instructions. There really are no hard and fast rules when it comes to super powers." He said, shifting his weight in his chair, "Just mess with it until something happens."

"Great," I muttered, jabbing at it viciously with my margarine mind. Unfortunately all that happened was that I got a mental image of melted butter, and my stomach ached at the almost imagined smell.

I tried more things than I could think for the next several hours. Every once in a while he would offer a suggestion, something he'd heard another pyrokinetic mention and everything he could remember from his old textbooks.

After several hours that really felt like minutes one of the guards that had brought Dad in came back to tell us that visiting hours were over now and that I could come back later. I opened my eyes and stood, still playing with the hot spot like a loose tooth. I sighed as my stiff muscles protested, and my hands burst into flame.

"Excellent!" Dad shouted, completely ignoring the glower from the security guard and examining my hands, "So, it's tied to your breathing, I've never heard of that before, although now that I think of it there was a cryokinetic that activated his powers with his breath."

I looked at my still flaming hands for a moment and watched as the amber flames danced on my fingers. Then my blood froze as a thought occurred to me.

"Dad, how do I make it stop?" I asked, only a little hysterically as I swung my hands around trying to shake the flames off of them.

"Just do the opposite of what you did to make them start." Dad said, laughing at the look on my face.

I sucked in a big lungful of air and the flames disappeared. I exhaled in relief, and they came right back.

"You need to let go of the power source first," Dad said gently, looking like he was deciding between looking proud or laughing.

"Right…" I muttered, and with that breath the flames were gone, leaving my fingers feeling as though I'd dunked them in a November pond.

"You'll be alright getting home?" Dad asked, as the guard took his wrists and secured them behind his back, "Wait, how did you get here in the first place, did your mother drive you?"

"No," I said, a little sheepishly, "I walked. And took the bus. But mostly walked."

"You're going to catch it from your mother when you get back," Dad said, looking at me worriedly.

"It's okay," I shrugged, trying not to think of the chains around my father's wrists.

"Look, be careful on your way home. And be sure to eat a good dinner. Our powers draw energy from our metabolisms, if you over do it and then don't eat you'll start taking energy from your reserves, and when those run out you'll start to auto-cannibalize your muscle mass. It's also easier to power up when you're full," Dad said, looking at me as though he might never see me again, and had to tell me…everything as the guard maneuvered him out of the room.

The door closed, and I left to retrieve my clothing before starting the long walk home.


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