[Stylist] Superhero flash fiction

[Chris Kuell]

Brax--and anyone else who might be interested -

Below is a flash fiction piece published in the Fall 2018 issue of Breath
and Shadow. It's not by me, but I think the writing is exceptional.

Chris

   *    *    *

Kryptonite
By Ocean


Every few seasons or so Superman sequesters himself in a private sanctuary
along with a ball of kryptonite. The kryptonite disables him. It makes him
kin to those desperate bodies with whom he is surrounded and to whom he has
made himself devoted. For him this is the retreat into the monk's cave, the
visionary's desert fast, the sauna chained shut. A confrontation with the
self, a self raw and trembling on the cusp of the void. He clears his
calendar and enters the chamber. The kryptonite pulses before him, green
beyond green, a chill crystalline eye. Over the course of days he drives
himself nigh to that eye, centimeter on agonized centimeter. Bared and
mortal he presses himself impossibly forward, against the will of every cell
in his screaming body. This ascetic Superman is the naked, weeping Jesus,
revealed beneath his impenetrable powers. Weak. Ill. Tormented.

Desperate and wanting, bargaining with himself for it to end.

Wrestling the mind that wanders toward Superwoman, toward all harms done by
his crimefighting mis-action, toward those he has lost. He approaches the
thing on hands and knees, crawling, slithering, the great spandexed man
moving on his quarry like a lizard. Weaker and weaker he becomes. The
sequence of time lengthens, each extension of muscle becoming a parabola of
decreasing possibility. Uncounted hours of ecstatic anguish pour over him
their horrible, caustic fluid. The radioactivity of the rock swims in his
veins, depopulating his will, his memories, his identity. Draped there
before it he feels that he has grown molten, that his body has begun to glow
with the absinthe color of this rock of his homeland, synonymous with sleep,
grave, and unbecoming. And so, mustering a single finger to reach, through
black holes of infinite space, quavering, to grace so delicately with sparse
fingertip that poisonous unplace of weariness that is the rock of Krypton-a
gesture that sends a shock of emptiness through his abraded nervous
system-he falls and rolls away from that vacuity, curling into the sensation
of limbs flooding again with their humanoid blood. He is of himself again.
And for a time, until his return to this sanctuary of undoing, Superman will
be spared that to which all others lay subject. The body.


Ocean is a disabled writer living in the mists of the northwest coast. His
poetry and fiction is known for its resuscitation of the mythic and
contribution to hypnogogic literary animism.