Author's note: Despite the summary, this isn't so much the entirety of Sarah Palmer's story as an introduction to her mythos. I hadn't intended that when I first wrote it, but, after I'd finished introducing my heroine's origin, personality, supporting cast, and connections with the canon characters, I realized that I'd said just about everything that I, personally, wanted to say about her. (Not quite, but just about. There are a few minor details... but never mind that.) I therefore invite my readers to look upon these eight chapters as an invitation. I have created a character who (I venture to say) is good for a hundred stories; can you tell me those stories? Can you take the hints and opportunities provided herein and turn them into gripping tales of supersonic adventure? Can you, in short, believe in Sparkle enough to make her a genuine (if not an "official") member of the DC pantheon? If so, go to it, and God speed you. (And show me the results when you're finished, won't you?)
Disclaimer: Whether the DC-Comics concepts truly belong to anyone is a debatable question. That they don't belong to me is a certainty.
Once upon a time, in Central City, Ohio, there was a girl who loved the Flash.
Actually, there were probably several hundred girls in Central City who loved the Flash, but this story is only concerned with one of them. Her name was Sarah Palmer; she was fifteen years old, with dark-brown hair, hazel eyes, and a thoroughly undistinguished scholastic record at Padre Pio Junior High School.
Now, when I say that Sarah loved the Flash, I don't mean that she was in love with him, any more than I would mean that she had romantic thoughts about stallions if I said that she loved horses. There were, no doubt, young women in Central City who daydreamed about having the Scarlet Speedster take them in his arms and whisk them away to his Castle of Speed (not that he had such a thing, but it was a necessary part of the fantasy), but Sarah wasn't among them. Her fascination with the Fastest Man Alive was of a more abstract nature: she collected trinkets and curios with his face on them, she followed his exploits religiously in the Central City Picture-News, and she doted on her mother's story of how, as a girl, she had been among the civilians saved by the original Flash in his first battle with the Rogues. In short, she was a member of that unobtrusive but highly active subculture that one social commentator had jocularly dubbed "the Flash-Pack".
Most Flash-Packers had a number of reasons for doing what they did (there was civic pride; there was a general fascination with superheroes attaching itself to the nearest available object; and, as hinted above, there was frequently a touch of romantic passion), but Sarah's motivation was unusually pure and uncomplicated. The Flash, for her, meant one thing and one thing only: the liberation of super-speed, the sheer exhilaration of being free from the limitations of Nature. It was much the same impulse that had driven the Wright brothers to invent the airplane – although in Sarah's case it had somewhat the opposite effect, leading her to become discontented with mechanical substitutes for the real experience. Even if an impossibly efficient automobile could have succeeded in breaking the light barrier, she felt, what good would that do her? She still wouldn't get to feel the air moving past her, or her own feet striking the ground as they carried her across the whole Midwest in a matter of seconds. It wouldn't be her who was achieving those astounding speeds, it would be the car – and why, she asked herself reasonably, should a stupid car have more fun than she did?
This was, perhaps, why she had volunteered to serve as lab assistant to the Padre Pio Junior High chemistry teacher. She knew that both Flashes had gained their powers when lightning had struck their lab and a bunch of chemicals had spilled on them, and she secretly hoped that the same thing might happen to her if she spent enough time around Dr. Graham's supply cabinet.
It wasn't a very serious hope, though. She did it because she couldn't bear to miss any opportunity, however slim, to share the Speed Force with her hero, but she knew perfectly well how absurdly the odds were stacked against her. She knew that, short of a miracle, she was destined to spend the rest of her life moving at a maximum speed of roughly 15 miles per hour, just like all the other average humans.
And she accepted that. Life, after all, held innumerable joys that were open even to non-speedsters; even if she couldn't outrun a photon, she could still listen to old rock-and-roll songs, watch the blue jays at her family's bird-feeder, and enthuse with her friends at school about the new football captain's physique. There was no sense in letting a single disappointment darken her entire life, and Sarah Palmer – an intensely sensible young woman – had no intention of doing so. (Although every now and then – especially on afternoons in the middle of summer, when everything around her seemed characterized by an almost intolerable slowness – she would stare at the smiling, red-clad figure in the full-length poster on her door, and she would let out a breath that contained most of the qualities of a wistful sigh, as well as several of those of a sob.)
Such was the life of Sarah Palmer: no different, except in detail, from the lives of a hundred other teenage girls in her city – until one morning in early April, when a chance encounter outside the Attica County Public Library turned her whole world upside down.