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#Writever 10.18 — Chevalier Knight

I was 13 years old when my dad crashed the Chevy and I learned that taking an airbag to the face would have been safer than teleporting into a field of corn at 25 miles per hour. If it weren't for the straight 3-foot wide corridor drilled through the green stalks directly in front of where the Malibu had stopped spinning, nobody would have figured out where I'd disappear to. With a broken arm, broken ribs, and a concussion—not to mention paper-cut-like lacerations on my face and arms from corn leaves—I might have lain unconscious and unfound until the next day.

As it was, I lay unconscious in the hospital. My parents and the police concluded I'd gotten ejected through a window that closed after the impact. Would it ever occur to you that your kid could teleport?

No; didn't think so.

A week later, I rode my bike to the corn field. I swatted away the bugs, seeing the still battered stalks. It didn't take a math or science wiz to see something had hit at high speed. Had I been thrown 30 feet, the impact would have curved downward and been less dramatic. Hitting the ground instead of cushioning plants would have broken my neck.

The truck had darted from the side road next to the corn field. I remembered wanting to be "there" not "here." Sometimes you get what you wish for, then regret it completely. My recollection, fuzzy as it was, was that I'd died, followed seconds later by smashing into stuff before a second pain-filled darkness enveloped me.

I had a superpower.

Obviously.

It didn't trigger again until I encountered a copperhead in the woods. Maybe treeing oneself is instinctual? The world faded, like a shut-off fluorescent dimming over seconds, as a sphere defined by jags of lightning grew around me until I floated in frigid vacuum. For seconds. My lungs emptied in a painful cough before I found myself hanging, head downward, hips snagged in a tree fork 50 feet up. It felt like I'd died. Like suicide. Teleporting felt bad like that.

The copperhead slithered away. Climbing down took hours.

Practice made it slightly more reliable. I toyed with becoming a firefighter, a rescue paramedic? But letting people know I could do it? Nah-uh. X-files reruns and popular TV disabused me of sharing. Having trouble getting a job and paying tuition, I thought up a novel profession. Stupid. Embarrassing.

I got a safety-deposit box to "case" the inside of the vault. A week later, I built the nerve to teleport. Into darkness. No lights. No ventilation. Disorientation, walls-closing-in claustrophobia dropped me to the floor. It took minutes to remember where to teleport out, because teleporting always failed if something was in the way.

The next day, the bank clerks would find a puddle of piss. Could the FBI trace DNA in urine?

Useless superpower!

It wasn't even fun. My idiocy scared me straight, anyway.

I was 25, helping out the summer before med school on a family friend's farm. They'd demolished a burnt down barn, clearing away 100 year old fire-hazard outbuildings. I was buffing my physique, truth be known. Despite the slash scar across my face from the corn field. Noreen would attend the same college and I harbored delusions of making her more interested in me in a less platonic fashion.

Tisha was a cute kid. Agile for her size, with obscene energy levels. Way too inquisitive to be left unsupervised. Listening to the news, you understand that wells and little kids attract one another like magnets. Finding I had a superpower made it all the more plausible. I'd helped pry the rotted boards off the wellhead.

I heard her wailing. I grabbed her uncle. The kid had slid into water to her chin, 20 feet down. She screamed unconsolably. Intelligence overrode simple valor: I got left to watch the well as the uncle rushed to fetch the paramedics and police.

His intelligence, not mine.

White knight fever transformed me into an idiot. I shined down my cellphone flashlight, chose a landing spot, and, excited, succeeded on the first try. I held my breath; I was that smart, at least! The space jammed my shoulders. I bruised my knees splashing down, failing not to kick the kid. It smelled like a sewer. Claustrophobic panic left me gasping, but that made teleporting easier. I pressed the child's face against my chest to shield her from the vacuum and found us in frigid darkness instantly.

We fell beside my red Ford Fiesta. The kid screamed, beating me with her fists. Scratched and bleeding up and down her body and face, she ran, wailing.

"You're welcome," I called after her, grinning.

I changed my bloody shirt and soaked jeans, so nobody'd ask uncomfortable questions. I felt rather happy with myself.

[2 hrs. Author retains copyright.]

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