There must be hundreds of names for boys. They could have called me George for the actor who played The Man of Steel on TV. But my adoptive parents, the Kents, were big fans of comic book heroes. So: they couldn’t resist naming me Clark. My oh-so-clever older brother lobbed taunts: Superman can but Clark Kent. When I was late for dinner, my mother reminded me I was supposed to be faster than a speeding bullet. In all my life, I never flew in and rescued anyone. I was just a lowly civil servant for thirty years. I made things happen within a tedious bureaucracy, and as soon as I could, I leaped into retirement in, you could say, a single bound. Now I’m seventy. Ten dog-years. Sometimes I hear a voice like kryptonite taunting that the sum of my life will never be success. But no one needs X-ray vision to see that ordinary is the common experience, and never regrettable. So: I listen to my friends complain about their many health problems. I carry packages upstairs to a neighbor who’s been quarantined. I read. Swim laps at the community pool. Who cares if you won’t find any of it mentioned in your Daily Planet?
Copyright 2021 by Brian Dean Powers
Photo by the author
He turned away from the window and his preoccupation with all that’s unknown and unknowable. His dedication to a profession rooted in reliable rules and procedures had been severely challenged by the doctor’s ghastly experiment. He settled into a large, comfortable chair before the hearth with, at a nicely calculated distance from the fire, a bottle of a particular old wine that had long dwelt unsunned in the foundations of his house. Who can really discern another’s motives, he wondered, and how is it we so quickly invent them when we have no evidence available? The fog still slept on the wing above the drowned city, where the lamps glimmered like carbuncles; and as usual he found no answers, though he deeply desired to see through the mist. Perhaps not all effects have causes, he thought, and some doubts need not be resolved, and through the muffle and smother of these fallen clouds, the procession of the town’s life was still rolling in through the great arteries with a sound as of a mighty wind. He raised his glass, resigned to replace one murk with another. In the bottle the acids were long ago resolved; the imperial dye had softened with time, as the colour grows richer in stained windows; he let all the unanswered questions dissolve and fixed his attention instead on the hearth, and so his mind, like the glow of hot autumn afternoons on hillside vineyards, was ready to be set free and to disperse the fogs of London.
Brawnie was standing at the bedroom window in the dark when Sean awoke.
A little before midnight and the beginning of the new year, Sean and Brawnie were sprawled together on the couch under their faded Packers blanket. Despite the bitter cold outside, Brawnie had shucked his shoes and socks under the coffee table.
The Body's Heated Speech 