Years went by. I grew up. I had two girlfriends and one bad break-up. Peter Parker separated from Mary Jane, who moved away to become a supermodel. The X-Men’s line-up shifted multiple times. Their Jim Lee costumes changed with each turnover until they could only be glimpsed in flashbacks and back issues. The Hulk grew smart, then dumb, then bald. Gotham City survived a plague, a major earthquake and an army of ninjas. Superman died then came back to life. Green Lantern was corrupted, went rogue, died saving the universe and was replaced by another Green Lantern. Spin-Man never made it past issue two.
I know this because, on the day after my graduation, I found a battered old copy of Spin-Man #2 in a book sale bargain bin. James was on the cover, hovering in the void of the universe as the tell-tale blue-and-gold vortex, the one that had transformed him into Spin-Man, whirlpooled around him. In the comic, a black hole had turned sentient and was trudging across the cosmos in the shape of an impossible spider. The Forces of Chaos had returned. Spin-Man, as valiant as ever, rushed to combat the threat, but in a critical moment, the Chaos Spider spat a web of nebulae at our hero, disrupting his celestial abilities and forcing him to spin into another dimension.
Spin-Man awoke in a void, buffeted on all sides by peculiar purple rain. He bowed his head in shame. I’ve failed, he thought. I’ve fallen into the unknown, somewhere beyond the far reaches of the multiversal continuum. If I don’t find my way back, the Forces of Chaos will engulf the universe and all that I hold dear. Spin-Man coughed. For a moment, his visage shifted into that of James, his human alter-ego. His eyes glimmered with hope. Spin-Man’s course was clear. I have to find my way back, no matter how long it takes. With that, he launched himself into the void, away from the reader, as the words “never the end” appeared beneath him, like a promise. It was the last issue of Spin-Man to achieve publication. I swear, I broke down right there in the middle of the bookshop, holding onto that stupid little comic book. I realised, right then, that I needed to do something; anything, or else James would be lost forever.
These days, CATS no longer sells comic books. They’ve since turned into a specialty store for action figures, and though I visit it from time to time, the bargain bins I used to thumb through are no longer there. I still buy comics every Wednesday when I have the money. I keep track of my favourite superheroes’ lives. For me they affirm that, despite hardship, some things may still endure. I’ve taken a course in Fine Arts, and I’ve been applying it to my comics’ illustrations, working hard to improve to a professional level. As soon as I finish college, I’ll send off applications to the major comic book companies. I’ll get a job in the States, and when I’ve saved up enough money, I’ll look up Echo Comics and buy the rights to Spin-Man.
Then I’ll publish Spin-Man #3, and in that issue, Spin-Man will be at the edge of the universe, contemplating his path home. A blue-and-gold wormhole will appear before him. With superhuman courage, Spin-Man will activate his cosmic powers, jump through the vortex, and spin his way back into our world.
Borrowed Time
Anabel Enriquez Piñeiro
Translated by Daniel W. Koon
Your hair, a centimetre or two longer, your skin maybe more tanned than the last time. Smooth, yes, like a shiny shell, without a single fold, without a scar. Me, on the other hand, my face could serve as the canvas for an astronavigation map: you could catalogue all my wrinkles by latitude and longitude. And locate all its globular clusters, wormholes, and black holes. There’s room for the entire universe on my face.
You don’t see my face. You have taken up residence on a spot on the terrace where you watch the stars fall—m-e-t-e-o-r-s, you make me repeat, letter by letter, helping me to spell it out with your hands. And even the perfume of the poplars in bloom seems to bother you. Serena-Ceti is a world without a future—you shake your fingers wildly and point at the night sky over the terrace.
Look up above, so many worlds to visit, so many twilights beneath double and triple stars, the chance to use hyperjumps to effectively live forever…an eternity of journeying between the stars. I struggle in vain to understand your words, your passion for those faraway lights in unknown and unreachable houses that inhabit the night; I am only five years old.
I run my fingers through your hands, as I did back then, trying to find some final assignment in them. But they are rigid, muteness, fingers that refuse to surrender the secret behind your need to transcend.
The Persephone docked for the first time on Serena-Ceti a few days after your confession on the terrace. How long ago was that for you? Three months, four…? It doesn’t matter… For you it is time elapsed, time transcended. For me, the indelible image: the hydrogen smell of the aerotransporter that carries you to the spaceport; the shards of glass embedded in the soles of my boots (from the last glass lamp we would ever put in our hallway); the colour of helplessness on my father’s face… You don’t need any superior intelligence to understand what “stomping out of the house” means to a five-year-old girl, even if she’s a deaf-mute. But I didn’t understand then what it meant for you. Father did.
Father spends hours writing up his Academy lectures, the crumpled papers piling up around him and his computer growing mouldy beneath the dust. He never sleeps more than two hours. He never rests. I think that he is afraid of falling asleep and aging at an accelerated pace. Or of falling asleep and dreaming of you. Father accompanies me to the pulse station in the capital to receive a message you sent barely a week after you left on the exploration ship, The Persephone, with that splendid annual contract as back-up exobiologist. I am twelve. You are exactly as I remember you. And your fingers speak with the same fluency as ever: maybe, when you see this message I will be arriving home. Funny how these transmissions keep coming from the Sorceress of Hyperspace. You must be quite grown up, sweetheart. And then, in gestures: I’ll bring you some glass rock earrings from Delta Altair to set off your ears with that short haircut of yours. I am twelve years old, hair down to my waist, my ears marked with scars from the cochlear surgery and the rejected implants that have not cured my deafness. But you don’t know. And in my naïve twelve-year-old eyes, that not knowing makes you innocent; and besides, I already know that you will be back in less than three years for my fifteenth birthday, and I will wear those earrings at a party and my ears will shine with the light from other worlds, from other stars, from the entire universe.
I waited a whole year when I turned fifteen. I watched so many twilights of our little sun and the conjunctions of the moons twice nightly. But not a single star came down from the sky. The Persephone arrived one random afternoon in the summer. I went by myself to pick you up at the spaceport. I’m sorry, Miranda, you said, with a quick hug and the same smile as ever. My calculation was off by a few minutes. You could not have forgotten the way. How far off was it this time…? Two minutes, five? That doesn’t matter to you either. But I’ve turned eighteen and it would have been a miracle for me to still be so naïve. Something has changed dramatically in this lost little world during what has seemed like only three weeks to you. I can forgive you missing a lot of things in your absence: the operating rooms, puberty rudely taking over my body, the angst of my first unrequited love, the listless and frustrating experience of my first non-orgasm. But your absence from my successes was more painful.