52 Stories

story by kpbstevens

Spotlight

Maeve has lost interest in my trick of hanging things on beams of light.  To me a beam of light is as solid as a coat rack or a laundry line.  It slants into a room and the dust motes spin in it, and I like to take little objects - marbles, bottle tops - and set them on the light, and watch them slide down it and land on the coffee table or the white sofa.  Maeve complains because I never pick them up afterwards. 

Maeve has copper-colored hair that’s naturally curly.  Light gets trapped in it.  I like to tell her that her hair is luminous, and run my hands through it, but she doesn’t like me to do this.  I can’t stop myself from picking out the little pieces of trapped light and throwing them on the floor.  This rids the hair of its luster, which is why Maeve objects.  But I like the way the light feels, squirming between my thumb and fingertip.  One night, after I had been combing her hair with my fingers, we started fighting, and I swept up all the little strands of light from the floor and dumped the dustpan over her head.  I was trying to give them back to her, but they looked like glitter, and she ran upstairs and slammed the bathroom door and took a shower.

 One time we locked ourselves out of our apartment, and our neighbor, Rebecca, had a flashlight.  She shined the beam at an open second floor window and I climbed up it.  Rebecca was impressed.  Maeve was grateful, but even then she wouldn’t agree that my ability is astonishing.

“Why can’t you be impressed, like Rebecca?” I asked her.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said tiredly.  “I guess I’ve seen it too many times.”  But when we’re really fighting, she’s more honest.  “You’re too vain about it,” she says.  “You think it sets you apart from other people.”

“It does set me apart from other people.  Other girls seem to like it.”

“Go be with them, then.”

“I only want you,” I tell Maeve, but I’m lying.  I’m used to Maeve.  I know who she is.  Other girls might be astonished by me, but I’m not astonished by them.  If I’m going to be with someone who isn’t as exciting as I am, it might as well be Maeve.

Maeve and I met in college.  It was before I ‘came out’ about my special ability, and it seems strange to me that I spent time worrying that it would isolate me from other people.  We lived down the hall from each other.  It was my birthday, and my friend Eric put a lot of balloons in my room, and got a sheet cake, and then felt bad because he hadn’t thought of anyone to invite.  So he went up and down the hall knocking on doors, and Maeve was in her room studying and came and ate cake.  She sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to me in a very low, somber voice.

She doesn’t approve of my new plan.  I want to get one of those big spotlights, the kind you see pointed up at the sky, waving back and forth to advertise some event and making a whole, bright circle on the bottom of the clouds.  The kind that was used to summon Batman.  I want to put this light in the front yard and shine it up at an oblique angle, and I want to walk up it, and sit on the flat circle at its top.

“It’s showing off,” Maeve says.

“It’s not showing off,” I say, “people will think it’s cool.”

“They’ll think you’re a show-off,” she says.

I call around to rental places while Maeve is at work.  The guys who deliver the spotlight are surprised that I want them to put it in our apartment building’s front yard.  “How are you going to power it?” they ask me, and I show them the orange extension cord I have.  They tell me that it pulls down a lot of watts and I tell them that it will be okay.  When they’re gone, I plug my extension cord into the socket in the living room and run it out through the window to the spotlight.

When Maeve comes home, she’s angry.  “You’re going to get us evicted,” she says.

“No, I won’t.  It will be cool.”

Maeve goes inside and slams the door.  I sit on our building’s stoop, guarding my spotlight, waiting for night.

Dusk comes slowly.  I study the sky and see bats wheeling through the air, and I hear the cicadas wake up and am appalled by the thrumming of their collective noise.  The street lights go on long before it really gets dark.  When the sky has turned black, I turn on my spotlight.  I stand up from the stoop and stretch.  I have a little step ladder, which I set beside the spotlight.  I climb to the top of it and step off onto the spotlight’s beam to begin my ascent.  The beam is wide and generous.  But it’s set at too sharp a slant.  I have to bend forward as I climb, grasping it with my hands.  Below, the tree tops swish in a slight wind.  Insects like the light, and they fly right through it and slap against my palms.  I glance up, but the top of the beam is still far away, round and flat and pressed against the bottom of the sky.  I glance down.  Maeve has come out of our apartment building and is standing in the yard, looking up at me.  The glow of the spotlight’s beam washes into her bright, burnished hair.  It washes away the expression on her face.  I lift a hand and give a little wave.  She looks down.  I see the orange extension cord, trailing along beside her foot.  She bends over to look at it.  She has only to grasp it and pull it lose from the spotlight’s cord, and I will fall.

Tags: /flash fiction /flash fiction lit /relationships /super powers /magic