Vanadium

Have you ever wished for a superpower? Most people equate a superpower with a superhero. Super speed? That’s the Flash if you’re a DC girl, Quicksilver if you’re more of a Marvel fan. Super strength? How about Superman, Captain America… even the Hulk. There’s a whole list of superheroes who can fly. A lot of people don’t realize a person with a superpower can just as easily be a super-villain. Easier even. For every hero there’s at least a dozen villains regularly terrorizing the civilians the hero is sworn to protect.

That’s all just childhood bullshit though. Superpowers like the ones in comic books don’t exist. At least not in the way they’re portrayed. They aren’t randomly given to some do-gooder who’s gonna use them to save the world or help poor old ladies.  Power doesn’t come easy. You can’t just be bit by a spider, or hit by a meteor, or some other freak accident and suddenly be able to impossible things with no consequences. Power always comes with a price. In this world that price is pain.

Oh sure there’s plenty of people who have managed to gain so called superpowers. Most of them are in an insane asylum. Or dead. The old saying that power goes to peoples’ heads proves to be truer than you think. It twists your mind into something unrecognizable. The anguish that accompanies attempting to contain and manipulate the forces that gives one power is enough to rip you out of your head. It forces some perverse unrecognizable version back in.

My gran had a superpower, just a small one. She could always tell when someone was lying. Not in the way everyone’s grandmother can tell when you’re lying about silly things. Like stealing a cookie from the cookie jar. She could come across a complete stranger and tell immediately if they were speaking the truth or not. You could say 100 different things, and with complete accuracy she could say what was and wasn’t a lie. We tested her all the time.

I begged her as a child to tell me where she got her power, but she’s always brush it off. She’d say somethings are too dangerous to know. Of course this made me want to know more. I wanted a power so bad, so I could run from all my problems. Run away from home and become a superhero. So one day when she caught me snooping through her diary for the umpteenth time she saw it sufficient to inform me of these dangers.

When my Gran was 15 her mother died. There was no casket at the funeral, just an urn with her ashes. Her father was still around, and he loved and doted on her. And while he gave her anything else she asked for, he wouldn’t tell her how her mother died. No one would. The whole town pretended like she had never existed. He was often gone at night and for long weekends. When she asked were he was he always had some reason. Business travel. Visiting an old friend. A distant relative was sick. The farmer across town asked for help bringing in the harvest. But my gran never really believed all these things were true. Not completely. Mama always said her pa had a penchant for telling half-truths.

One night when her pa was gone again she decided to sneak into her mother’s old craft room, a place she had always been forbidden. Inside the room there seemed to be more books and candles and strange herbs rather than craft supplies. There was also a simple looking wooden chest, like a jewelry box. Inside was a necklace with a gem she had never seen before. It was black. No silver. No red, definitely red. But every time she looked away from it she could no longer remember the color.

A bang at the front of the house startled her, so she ran out the back and down to the river. She stripped down to nothing and waded out into the glitter of the stars reflected in the ripples. She put on the necklace and begged her mother for help. She wanted to be able to tell exactly when her father was lying to her about anything. To know when people were lying to her about what happened to her mother. She stayed out there until the sun rose again. With the days new glow she had her wish. She could tell when anyone was lying.

And that’s where her story ended. When I asked her if she ever found out what happened to her mother she said you should always be careful what you wish for. More than that she said there were consequences to always knowing the truth. A side effect of her new power was that telling a lie herself caused her immeasurable pain. The greater the lie the greater the agony. I asked her what she did with the necklace. She said she destroyed it. She died that night.

Nevertheless I was too stubborn to listen. I stayed obsessed with the idea of being ‘blessed’ with a superpower too. My gran wasn’t the only one who had powers. Society knew these people existed, but it wasn’t encouraged. Their powers were to hard to contain, leading most of them to sad endings. In college I met people like me, people who thought we would be different. We would control our powers.  We called ourselves Vanadium. A beautiful metal capable of containing and storing vast quantities of energy, of power, almost indefinitely. We thought we were the same. Mostly our little team involved hanging out in the basement of our shitty rundown townhouse on the edge of campus, blaring alternative music and drinking till we blacked out. We took brightly colored pills that we claimed helped us connect to the forces that give us powers. We tried obscure ritual after obscure ritual. It was only a matter of time before we got one right.

We all had our own reasons. We all had death marks. And we decided to burn these marks in a sacrifice.  Alona had a twin who died when they were 9. Her parents still had her room set up exactly as it was, so Alona took her sisters favorite teddy bear. Matthew’s father had lost his battle to cancer that year, so he took his old baseball cap he wore every day. Alex had a delicate little ring, silver with a pink jewel inlaid. He didn’t say were it came from. We didn’t ask. To top it all off I’d found the necklace my gran described. She had lied about destroying it. We waited till the full moon, went down to the lake. We lit a fire on the beach and burned it all together. We all got naked and scooped up a handful of the ashes before sitting in the shallows. Freezing cold, wondering if we’d get powers or pneumonia we each begged in our own way for a blessing. Instead we got cursed.

It seemed great at first. Alona could make you feel whatever she wanted. If you hurt her she could make you hurt. She could make you the happiest you’ve ever been. Or scared. Hopeful, excited… desperately sad. She made her parents love her and hate her sister. Matthew could heal anything. A headache, a broken toe, the bruises from a car crash. Alex could leave his own body, walk this earth undetected as a projection of himself. Eventually he could walk between worlds too. I could finally run away from everything that hurt me, faster than any comic book superhero. And for awhile we grew stronger, we contained the energy inside use. We were powerful. We were vanadium.

The more Alona used her powers the less she could feel her own emotions, and the more she could feel others. She would sit in a room by herself for hours staring at a wall and feeling nothing. But if she walked by a homeless vet on the streets she would break down into hysterics, screaming from a PTSD that wasn’t hers. It got to a point where she couldn’t even feel pain when hit but being around too many people overwhelmed her emotional range to the point of losing consciousness.  Eventually after hours of being alone just wanting to feel something on her own, anything at all, she turned to the cold bite of the blade. One night she went too far.

Matthew didn’t use his powers often at first, and only very infrequently. The catch with his party trick was that whatever ailment of injury he healed, he felt the pain of it. If he healed a headache, he got a headache. If you broke a finger, twisted your ankle, or got stabbed in the stomach he absorbed the pain from it. So he stuck to healing little things, the effects of which he could handle. Not to mention it was hard to do. The effort and focus it took to manage even a paper cut at first were enough to make him faint. Still as far as our “gifts” went it seemed that he was the best off. That was until his best friend was in a car accident that put him in the ICU. The doctors were coming to pull the plug when they walked in the room and instead found him sitting up without a scratch and Matthew dead on the floor. Guess somethings just can’t be healed completely but rather passed on.

Alex remained the same as the pretty little ring we burned, an enigma. I have no idea what happened to him in the end. As his power grew and he was able to walk between more planes the more distraught he seemed to become. He was an art major, visiting his studio was like walking into a mass murder scene from a body horror film. The things he saw filled pages of sketchbooks, canvases, and his dreams. One day I found him shaking so hard I thought he was having a seizure. I begged him to stop walking but he said he couldn’t. He was looking for someone. That was the last time I saw him. He could be in mental institution, dead, or his body stuck in a coma somewhere while his spirit was trapped in the unknown to us.

I watched all of this happen, watched my friends slowly go insane, watched the people I loved most die or disappear, in slow motion. Every moment of their agony was forever etched in my memory in excruciating detail. Because while everyone else saw me moving quickly I saw the world inching by at a snail’s pace. Every aspect of my being was sped up, including the ability of my brain to process things happening around me. What seems a minute for most was an eternity for me. I witnessed every facial expression, every flash of pain through their eyes. It took less than a year for my friends to lose their lives and their head but an entire lifetime for me to see it all. All the time in the world to process it, no power in the world to stop it. I am a blur, finally free of all life’s mundane problems. I have one of the most coveted superpowers of all time, and all the sorrow to prove it.