Soliloquies Anthology 30.1

If Jaya was being honest with herself, she hadn’t been alright in some time. Todd had decided that she needed some rest, and Jaya was in no state to disagree with her handler. She would rest when she was dead, she would have normally said, but she had screws in her ribs and femur that attested she almost had. She could have stayed at the Tower with her friends but Todd had insisted that she get out of the city and relax until she was feeling better.

The lakeside mansion was far too big for one person. The white walls gave way to floor-to-ceiling windows, letting in as much light as the pines allowed.

“It’s all very modern,” Todd explained as they climbed the ten steps to the front door. “As soon as the doctor said you needed a time out I sent someone to clean it up and stock up the kitchen.”

Jaya’s knee brace whined with each step she took to the front door. Even though pain shot through her leg with every step, she didn’t show it.

As soon as Todd opened the door, Jaya was hit by the smell of disinfectant. To her left, the open kitchen was shining; the black marble countertop and stainless-steel burners seemed to have never been used. The living room was down two steps, nestled on the right side of the mansion. The fireplace was stacked with logs but unlit —which was for the best, as it was already June. The leather couch sat perpendicular to it, facing the giant window overlooking the lake. A staircase across from the front door led upstairs.

“See, what did I tell you?” Todd said as he set her bags down. “You’ll be plenty comfortable.”

Jaya pursed her lips. She was three hours away from home, and the nearest town, Willow Creek, was another eight miles away. The summer home, as Todd called it, wasn’t a retreat, it was a punishment. The only other person she knew who’d spent some time here was Arthur and he’d told her it was ‘in the sticks, beside nowhere town and Big Foot’s cave.’

Jaya hadn’t wanted to believe him, but now that she was seeing it for herself, she was sad to see he hadn’t exaggerated.

“Which bedroom do you want?” Todd asked as he climbed up the stairs, a bag in each hand.

“It’s fine. I’ll handle it.”

“You sure?”

“Certain.”

He set the bags down and returned to the main living space.“I better get going,” he said as he glanced at his watch. “Who knows what trouble Alder will get into if I’m gone too long.”

Jaya frowned.

“Are you sure you don’t want to stay a bit? Get some lunch?”

“I’ll eat on the way. You enjoy your rest here, you hear me? We’ll keep in touch and

I’ll come pick you up for your appointment in a month, alright? Use the machine. The doctor gave it to you for a reason.”

Todd opened the front door and pulled the car keys out of his jacket pocket.

“If you need anything, don’t hesitate to call. I can have a team up here in an hour, tops. For anything, you hear me?”

Jaya only hummed. She leaned against the front door as her handler walked down the stairs and over the crunching gravel path back to his car.

“See you in a month.”

“See ya,” he replied with a wave before stepping behind the wheel.

The car turned around and headed back down the gravel road, its frame bouncing over

the potholes. With a sigh, Jaya returned inside.

Now that Todd was gone, the cabin was silent, and Jaya feared making any noise as if it would disrupt the building itself. She crashed onto the couch with a wince and stared at the disks of light on the ceiling. She could feel the metal screws within her. She longed to pull them out. She should have been able to, but even as she tested their magnetic pull, she felt no response, no tickle in the palms of her hands, only the faintest twitch in her brain.

She’d taken three pieces of rebar through her chest and leg, which was quite a strange injury for her, because she was a veritable magnet. She could have deflected the pieces of

debris or held them aloft, safely out of reach. She had tried. They had stabbed her anyway. At the hospital, the doctor had tested her brain, running the kind of tests they’d done on her when she was fourteen and freshly enlisted for superhero training. He couldn’t explain why the rebar hadn’t bounced away like she’d wanted. He’d said she must have been tired, that she needed rest. That it would be better in a month, when her femur was healed, and to not overexert herself in the meantime.

No, Jaya was not honest with herself, and despite the perpetual unease in her chest, she continued to tell herself that everything would be fine.

#

During her first few hours at the lakeside mansion, Jaya made a few interesting discoveries. First, despite scanning the waterline from the balcony, she could not spot a single willow. Why call the town Willow Creek if there wasn’t a single willow nearby?

Second, she found a switch in the living room which turned the windows opaque, plunging the ground floor of the mansion in darkness. Beside it, she found another switch which brought the flat screen TV down from the ceiling.

Third, she found that descending into the garage was difficult with her broken leg, and climbing back up was even harder. There was a Jeep in the garage, and she could technically use it to drive herself around, but it was so difficult and painful to get to that Jaya decided never to go down into the garage if she could help it.

Finally, she discovered that the continuous passive motion machine the doctor had prescribed for her leg slotted itself very nicely against the couch, meaning she could lounge in front of the TV while letting the machine move her leg for her.

From that initial evening, all her discoveries were displeasing. On the first morning she found that the mansion was oriented west and the sun rose over the lake far too early for her liking. She was woken up when a sunbeam fell on her face and blinded her, pulling her from her dream. She thought she might solve the issue by turning the windows opaque. But then, because of the lack of light, she overslept and felt terrible about it all day long.

After breakfast, she realized that, despite Todd’s claims that the kitchen was stocked, it wouldn’t last her the whole month. Jaya wasn’t exactly a great cook, so she turned to the ready-made meals she found in the freezer.

Her friends’ texts were few and far between. They had a steady schedule of training, completing missions and making public appearances that didn’t leave them much time to reply to her texts. Jaya threw her phone aside. She lounged on the couch. She read. She binge-watched the period romantic show she had been meaning to watch. She relaxed on the deck chair outside. She finished her novel while she dipped her feet into the lake. She returned to the couch. She watched some stupid reality TV show about a guy flipping amusement parks until she felt her brain turned to mush. She took a nap and woke up much later than she’d planned and couldn’t fall asleep that night. She ordered books online but then, she realized it would take a few days for them to arrive. She spent a few minutes staring at the ceiling, imagining that she could make the screws in her ribs twitch. She couldn’t, and despite her best attempts, they remained steadily trapped in her bones.

Though she didn’t turn on the news, she spent enough time on social media to see that Todd had already explained her absence. Many people wished her a good recovery, while some assumed it was a cover-up. Some people conspired that she was dead, while others thought she’d been captured by some super-villain; Others speculated that she had reached her ‘expiration date’ and they would replace her with someone younger. They made her laugh for a bit and she almost thought about posting about it, but Todd had asked her to keep quiet about her location, so she held back.

Life moved at a snail’s pace in the mansion. She counted the minutes before it was a reasonable time to eat. She wished she could work out but had been forbidden to. It only prolonged her suffering, because she knew if she ate too much, she would be even more out of shape when she returned; But what else was she supposed to do?

After a very long afternoon spent binging Roller-Coaster King punctuated by the whirling sound of the CPM machine and the crunching of the chips in her mouth, Jaya could not take it anymore. She needed to be productive. She needed to do something. She decided to try baking. She bought an online cookbook and set out to make muffins. She glared at the metal pans and bowls but they didn’t so much as tremble, so she had to move them by hand.

Her first batch burned. So did the second. The third had too much yeast and overflowed into a monster muffin that dripped into the bottom of the oven. The fourth batch never rose and she later realized she’d used icing sugar rather than flour.

She was running out of ingredients and patience, but she would not give up until she had succeeded. She ordered food to be delivered and watched TV as she waited. Four Roller-Coaster King episodes later, the delivery person was still nowhere to be seen. She checked her phone again and again, but no text or call arrived. She tried to check the tracker on the app, but it could not locate her delivery guy.

Jaya’s tongue hit the back of her teeth with annoyance and she extricated herself from the couch. The opaque windows made it seem like the middle of the night but it was a few hours away from sunset still. She checked her phone again but she hadn’t received any calls.

Though she had no desire to drag herself to the Jeep, she checked the location to the nearest supermarket and found one halfway between the town and the mansion.

Her phone finally rang and she answered.

“Hello?”

“Hey, this is for your Dash delivery? I’ve been going in circles and I can’t find your place.”

“It’s just off the road,” she replied.

Pinching the bridge of her nose, she tried in vain to remember any landmarks that might help the man.

“I’ll just drop it off by the driveway, then.”“What!”

“Look, I’ve got like five other deliveries to make and I’ve wasted enough time on yours.”

“Dude, come on. I’m telling you it’s just off the road.”

“You can come pick it up there. I gotta go. I’ll send you a picture.”

“I have a broken leg-” she shouted, but the call ended there.

She huffed. A moment later, the picture of her grocery bag pinged on her phone. He had left it against a tree, which did not narrow down its location at all. She could just leave it there, she thought for a moment. She still had food for a while and this was mostly flour, sugar and other things she needed for her muffins. On principle alone, however, she could not let this slide. She was going to retrieve her food, and she was going to leave a one star review on the asshole delivery guy’s profile.

She put on her shoes and exited the house, only to hear thunder rumble. Jaya looked up and saw the sky was more gray than blue. A summer storm was rolling over the lake. If she had to suffer the rain too, she would sue the delivery guy. She hurried down the stairs. In her hurry to get out, she had forgotten to put on her knee brace. She hadn’t realized how much it helped her until she had to limp-run her way down the gravel driveway. Every step was like another screw was added to her leg, twisting into her bones. She tried to walk without bending her knee and somehow it was worse.

She reached the end of the alley and paused. There was nothing there so she checked her phone again. None of the nearby trees matched the ones in the photo. The tree in the picture was kind of… brown, but not like these, and the bark was mossy, but it looked different than the trees around her. The bark looked rather thin, but maybe it was a trick of the light. Jaya sighed to stop herself from throwing her phone on the ground.

She should just go home, she thought. The idea was so foreign to her that it made her furious. And do what? Lay on the couch for another five hours watching stupid reality TV, waiting to go to sleep so she could do the same thing the next day? No, she would be productive, she would find her groceries and master that muffin recipe if it was the last thing she did.

She decided to head toward the town, hoping to find her bag on the way. Each step was like a hammer to her leg and a chisel to her chest, but she pressed on. If only her powers hadn’t abandoned her, she could have lifted herself off the ground. She could still feel the earth’s magnetism beneath her feet, like a second soil hidden deep beneath the first, but everytime she reached for it, it remained a placid line under her, rather than the dip and spike she was used to.

She limped uphill, glancing at her phone every so often and glaring at all the trees around her. Then rain crashed over her. She did not let it slow her down, even as her drenched black hair fell in front of her eyes. She heard thunder echo through the woods but she didn’t see lightning, despite the dimness that surrounded her. At this rate she would make it to the supermarket before she found her stupid grocery bag, she thought bitterly.

She tripped on a root and landed face first in the wet dirt. Pain surged through her body as if she’d been struck by a lightning bolt. The pain was so intense that she could not move for some time, she could only feel the thick drops of water land on the back of her shirt and roll over her healing scars. With a roar that turned into a sob, she rolled herself on her back. Another whine tore past her lips before she could contain it. The harder she fought against her tears, the harder she cried. Real lightning streaked the sky and crashed somewhere in the wood, making the ground shake. As she stared at the slate-colored sky, Jaya wished the next lightning bolt would strike her down.

For more than half of her life—almost twenty years now—Jaya had been a superhero.

She’d worked hard to get into the program and she continued to work hard even now. She never took breaks, she was always training, always ready, because when she wasn’t ready, people got hurt, or worse. Now she was the one who was hurt, and she couldn’t lift a quarter even if she tried. What if her powers never returned? What would she do with herself? This was the only thing she knew how to do.

She cried harder, hoping it might wash the pain out of her. It didn’t, and instead every sob jolted the screws in her chest. She placed her hand over her ribs, where she knew they were, and she pulled. She was getting used to the silence now, to not hearing the metal respond to her command, and that scared her most of all. She was thrown back into that moment – when her friends had cleared the rubble of the building as rain battered the city, only to find her pinned to the ground, rebar protruding out of her like it belonged in her chest and her leg. They had pulled her off, but she was still there, trapped on those pieces of rebar.

She gritted her teeth and sat up, brushing the rain and dirt off of her face. It was impossible to stand up, so she crawled to the nearest tree and dug her nails into the bark to force herself up. She limped home, brushing tears of pain from her eyes every time they burgeoned. By the time she made it back to the mansion, she was soaked but she didn’t care.

She headed for the couch and crashed there. She let her wet hair dry against the headrest amoment, until her cold damp clothes clung to her body. Before she headed upstairs to change,

she pulled out her phone and called Todd.

“Hey Champ!” he said. “How’s the weather up there? Need anything yet?”

Her voice shook with tears as she replied:

“I don’t think I’m alright, Todd…”