#23 Flora Blackwell

I really don’t know how to explain how I got here, standing in my best friend’s apartment while washing blood from my clothes.

(It’s not mine or hers.)

I guess it started a few years ago when I was ten. The Puberty fairy came to me early, which wasn’t a very happy event. Imagine waking up one morning and not only does your chest hurt but it is apparently alive and growing and something is bound to burst out of your chest and you’re going to die a horrible death. I didn’t take it well, needless to say. That’s not the point, or the whole point. My point is, puberty is already hard to begin without adding freakish powers into the mix. That started when I was just about to enter high school. I suppose that it wouldn’t have been as bad as it was at first without those powers, so I do suppose I am grateful for them. Without those powers, I wouldn’t have been doing so poorly, letting my grades slip while I figured out what the hell was wrong with me. Without my grades slipping, my parents wouldn’t have noticed how badly I was suffering (not that they were completely inattentive, but some things did slip out of focus for them). Without my parents noticing, I wouldn’t have met Riley.

Riley is the best thing to have ever happened to me, and I wouldn’t trade anything in the world for that, even to be normal.

(I’ll stop here about her, because otherwise I will go on forever.)

Do you want to know about this freakish power? It’s getting to be a growing news topic. Some people have even figured out the source of it. You might not have heard about it, but there used to be a town called Bramley. Long before I was born, my mother used to live there. She can’t remember too much about the explosion, only that it had been on a hot August night, so humid that your clothes stick to your body and you can’t get comfortable. That’s really the only thing she remembers about that night because the resulting explosion made everything meld together.

Oh, I should actually tell you about my power. I can heal people. I know you think that it’s a little lame, but it’s really not. I thought at first that – aside from it being absolutely strange and horrible – there wasn’t any real use for my power besides in a passive setting. Then I learnt something the hard way.

I can bring the dead back to life. (I just wish I could get the blood out of my shirt.)

It doesn’t work on all dead bodies, I’m sure. I haven’t had a chance to break into a morgue and test on someone embalmed or otherwise preserved, but I do know that it doesn’t work on those who have been cremated (alas, poor Snuffles, I never knew ye). But the freshly dead – they’re game.

Riley thinks I should test my power to the extreme, but I’m not a big fan of that idea. I know how my power works, but I don’t see the point in doing something probably illegal to figure this out. I’d rather take the chances to test my powers as they come. I can raise the dead, and I can heal any injury – including a crossbeam through my spine, but that’s an even longer story.

Riley’s other plan is one that I am surprisingly OK with, despite it basically painting a huge target on my back. I am also not a fan of Spandex, but I managed to talk her out of that one. It hasn’t stopped her from designing a superhero outfit for me, though. I also won’t have a choice when she finally does design one that I like. I can’t say that I am a big fan of these “sexy nurse” ones, or the ones that look like Superman’s threads mated with Sailor Moon’s.

(The Templar Knight one wasn’t bad, but she crumpled that one up a long time ago. Oops.)

Do you want to know more about me? I don’t see why that is of much interest to you. I’m nearly done my undergraduate degree and am terrifyingly aimless, except for Riley’s idea of making me into this town’s superhero (which wouldn’t be bad, considering the number of shootings in certain areas). Don’t ask how I’m supposed to support myself while doing that. Just because I can heal myself doesn’t mean that I can go without sleep. I still have a lot of anxiety issues, but Riley is wonderful in helping me with that (and insists that this “gig”, as she puts it, will help even more, but I don’t see how that will work). I still live at home with my parents, which is why I’m still in my best friend’s bathroom trying to get a once-dead-man’s blood out of my shirt (I think it’s a lost cause now).

My name is Flora Blackwell, and I no longer wish I could be normal like you.

Category: 2011, Drama, Superhero