I couldn’t tell you exactly when it started or why. I think that it began around the second grade, or whenever it was when I lost my first baby tooth. I placed the tooth carefully under my pillow along with a shakily written note for the tooth fairy, begging for her to visit that night. Then, I wandered into the kitchen, shoved a slice of bread in the toaster, and took a seat on the wooden bench that my mother had purchased from a flea market down the road, right on the grounds of the abandoned New England State Hospital. It was one of those old antique-looking benches that wasn’t actually antique, just stained to look so, and had cost a few thousand more than its actual worth. The kind of thing people could get away with back then. This was before 2008, before the crash, and before everyone seemingly lost everything. I sat there on the faux antique—looking at the stainless steel toaster across the kitchen—and realized that I forgot to turn it on. Instead of getting up, I just sat and stared at the toaster. And I sat and stared and sat and stared and then . . . sniffed. The bread was beyond golden and I smelled smoke. That’s when I heard a beeping in my ear. Three light beeps, inaudible if the television were any louder. But I didn’t tell anybody; perhaps I had turned the toaster on and the little red light was simply malfunctioning. I let that one go, ate the toast, and played with the gray cat on the porch, impatiently waiting for bedtime.
The next incident didn’t happen until my sister was born a few years later. My family had moved to New York because there was more work there that we could do. At this point, mom, dad, Ella, and I were in a two bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. Ella and I shared a small room with uneven hardwood floorboards and a window that overlooked an alley, that sometimes stirred with hushed deals and quick send-offs, but was mostly quiet. Ella hated to fall asleep without holding my hand. Once she learned to speak, she would exclaim, “Julia sleeps on the floor!” and I’d kneel down reluctantly and pretend to sleep beside the crib. One night, she stuck out her little hand to signal that she wanted me to hold it so, as always, I crawled onto the floor and let her clutch my fingers. But my arm grew heavy as I stared into the darkness. After an eleven hour shift at the Deals and Steals—a funny kind of store that used to sell candy years ago and still donned the proud “Candy, Soda, Snacks” sign over the display window—I was tired. I ached for dinner and sleep. As my stomach rumbled, I widened my eyes. I imagined duplicating myself so that one of me was holding Ella’s hand and another me was eating my go-to meal: chili with a side of sourdough. And that’s exactly what happened. As Ella tightly held onto my fingers, the other me, the duplicate, went to the kitchen to finally eat my dinner. Then I heard two light beeps.
Luckily, nobody ever saw these things happen and I didn’t tell anyone about them. How could I? I sensed that I didn’t have an unlimited amount of times to use my “superpower,” if you want to call it that. Especially since I noticed the amount of those beeps decreased by one after each event. But there wasn’t a guidebook to any of this. If there was, I wouldn’t have wasted the power on toast and Ella. All I could do was save the last one for the most pressing, most urgent, most necessary moment possible.
That moment came yesterday.
I was walking down 85th and Lex when I saw him. It had been four months since the last correspondence. This was after our direct contact dissipated because of his drinking, which led to the yelling, which led to me wearing longer sleeves and waking up earlier to add more layers of makeup. The marks human eyes couldn’t see took longer to fade. That summer, I even temporarily moved into another apartment near the water. Whenever I walked to the end of the pier, I thought about the fact that this little apartment would be completely underwater in a matter of time. Maybe not in my time—but soon—a thought that was hard to understand and even harder to bear. My temporary hideaway was just the basement of a friend’s, and there weren’t any windows or furniture, but it was magnificent, because it was untouched and away from all that was tainted by him. Even if it would all be underwater eventually.
After the summer was over, my breathing turned shallow and my chest tight at the thought of returning to my old neighborhood, where I knew that he knew all the liquor stores, sports bars, and my front door. My building seemed to have shrunk since I was gone, and the nail salon on the corner was vacant. I thought maybe this would somehow trick him into being unable to recognize the block. But sure enough, there he was, waiting for me outside of my seemingly shrunken building, slumped against that old green door. A miniature bottle of tequila in hand. I watched him put his phone in his jacket pocket and take out the black gloves I had given to him for his birthday last year. He had asked me to stitch his initials on the inside, enveloped by a stitched crown, because, like with all of his things, he liked to make it clear that he owned them.
“Don’t use it, don’t use it,” I whispered to myself as I inched towards him, convincing myself to just halt and make a sharp right turn, with a silent prayer that he wouldn’t see me thrown in for good measure. But he looked up and stared right at me, immediately lurching forward. And before I could stop myself, I lifted his body and placed him far away. Really far. I like to imagine that he ended up in another country. South America. São Paulo, Brazil, maybe.
He screamed as I lifted him, writhing in the air. Onlookers passed us, glancing up at him with widened eyes before hurrying by. He continued to shriek, rising higher and higher. But before he vanished completely from the sky, he cupped his hands around his mouth and leaned in towards me. As far as I would let him.
And above the faint single beep ringing in my ear, I swore I heard him say, “I knew it.”