Mistake of the gods. Changing size. Sylvie Storm. Neutrinos.
But I digress more maybe than necessary. Sylvie was calling. I was still dismounting my Vespa, emptying saddle bags, when my cell phone buzzed and lit up and I could hear the call was from Sylvie, my unfaithful half goddess psychotherapist and part time partner, probably calling to warn me off another one of my bad decisions. We shared office space in a little place I owned up on Queen Anne, a folk Victorian from 1907, inherited from my mother. Glaucus, Sylvie said, when we first met, fate is the decisions you make. Sometimes I think she remains my occasional companion just so she can restock this rune of hers into my road weary bag of regrets. Decisions I made? When was there ever a decision I made that was mine alone and not influenced in some way by the gods? And the gods make mistakes. In any case, and to bring to a close that business with Vettebug, and before we go on too much further here, I should probably make clear, I am not some comic book hero, or villain. I am a mistake of the gods. I am at least part human. The rest I’m not sure of, though certainly not from planet Earth. I am able to adjust my size at will, though at a huge cost of energy, and at risk of random results, coming and going. Having made a change in size, I require rest. Indeed, I am often near death. I prefer small sizes, the easier to negotiate and move about without attracting much attention, to move through crowds, for example. To explain in a way you might understand (indeed, in a way I might understand), I’m able to break myself down into an emergent group of neutrinos. Thus I’m able to move through solid masses – walls, mountains, trees, Corvettes. But I say emergent because it’s never totally certain what the group will reform into. In other words, I’m never certain I’ll be able to return to what you might call normal, that is, my normal size, the size in which I choose to live most of my life. I’m subject, then, to a certain amount of randomness, to noise, to use a word the actuaries are fond of. To bring to a close, then, the Corvette incident: I changed the Corvette to the size of a Matchbox toy car. Vetteman was now the giant he wished for.
“Mistake of the gods”
is episode 4 of
Ball Lightning
a Novel in Progress
in Serial Format at The Coming of the Toads
The Coming of the Toads 