Grayscale

by A. E. Clarke

  I could feel it getting warm. Not uncomfortably warm—it was a nice feeling, like it was wrapped in a cozy mitten. Sort of how even in the summer, it can be nice to sit near a fire in the evening, not because you’re cold but because it’s warm.

  I opened my eyes—and nearly yelped. Even though I was imagining the warmth as having come from a mitten, it was definitely not what I expected to see. There was so much energy—or electricity or whatever it was—in the air around my hand that it looked like I was actually wearing a bright-blue mitten.

  “This doesn’t even make sense.” I turned it over in front of my face to see both sides. It looked a little thinner on the back of my hand than on the front, but overall, it was basically like I’d always imagined an aura looked. My hand was glowing so brightly it was visible a couple inches away from my skin.

  I wiggled my fingers, and little sparks flew out; they barely made it past the glow. I frowned. That wasn’t as good as I’d hoped.

  And, well, I also didn’t want to shoot anything without really meaning to.

  I can do better than that!

  I sucked the power back into me and realized just how tired I had been with it outside of my skin.

  I guess that makes sense, considering it’s just my energy on the outside.

  I think.

  I shrugged and felt my hair lift for a second, trying to stand on end. I sighed.

  Okay, so I know I can put it in and out of my body…

  I held my hand in front of my face and tried to make the energy cover just my fingers then move down to my wrist.

  Awesome. It wasn’t perfect, but I could do it.

  This is amazing…and I know that I can shoot. Let’s just see…

  I held my hands together and shot out a reasonably large bolt. It flew a few inches through the air, then fizzled. That was a lot closer to what I knew I could do—but with two hands.

  Hmm.

  It had been a lot easier at the park, when I’d actually been shooting at something. Maybe that was the problem—last night, I’d been trying to accomplish something. Right now, I was just playing around.

  I went back inside and into the kitchen. I opened the cupboard underneath the sink and grabbed a large ice cream bucket—our parents had always kept them once they were empty in case we needed a large container, and it would hold a lot of water if I accidentally started another fire.

  I filled the bucket, and as I turned the tap off, I could have sworn I’d heard the front door open, but when I checked the front door, I couldn’t see anything. I shrugged it off and walked outside. I must be hearing things. Another point for crazy, I guess!

  Out in the backyard again, I put the bucket of water next to the end of the porch I’d been aiming at and then walked to the other side. Pointing at the railing above the tub of water, I jerked my finger upwards like I’d shot a “gun” as a child pretending to be a soldier. A small bolt came out, shot about a foot in front of me, and disappeared into the air with a small pop, sort of like a cap gun had gone off under a pillow or something.

  Interesting.

  Now, was it possible that I would be able to power things?

  I opened the porch door—and stopped. I swallowed the lump that had suddenly formed in my throat.

  Jesse was standing there, mouth open wide in amazement.

  “Oh…you’re home early,” I said, bringing my hand behind my back. I was pretty sure he’d seen at least my hand, but I really hoped he hadn’t or he was going to freak.

  Chapter Ten: Jesse

  I arrived home from school and rolled my eyes at Holly’s bag still being in the foyer. You’ll never learn to put things away, will you? At least it makes me aware that you’re home… I walked up the stairs and left it outside her room. I figured that I would let her have her privacy, especially if she had Alex over.

  I smiled, thinking about the night before last, and then blanched as I remembered running into her at three a.m.

  “Holly, you in there?” Okay, I needed to have this conversation. I needed to talk to her about this—it was getting ridiculous.

  “Holly?” Nothing, but the room felt empty. She wasn’t a heavy sleeper while napping.

  I sighed. She had to be in the house somewhere. She rarely left without her bag. I’d find her eventually.

  I walked downstairs to make myself a snack, and as I went into the kitchen, I turned my head and saw Holly standing on the porch, a bright-blue mitten on her hand. She was staring at it, completely enthralled.

  Did you take more painkillers, Holly?

  I peeked around the curtains, saw her point to the other end of the deck, and—

  What the hell?!

  I swear something shot out of her hand. She turned towards me as I opened the sliding door, and I guess the shock was obvious on my face because she cleared her throat, said, “Oh…you’re home early,” and tried to hide the blue hand behind her back as if I hadn’t seen it yet.

  Nice try. “Y-yeah. What the hell was that?”

  “What was what?”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Don’t even try it, Holly. I saw that, whatever…whatever that was.”

  I could almost hear the gears working in her head, figuring out whether to tell me the truth or try to convince me I’d seen something that wasn’t there.

  “Jesse, I…I don’t know how the hell to tell you this. I don’t want to worry you.”

  “Let’s put it this way. You died yesterday—technically, at least. I think that filled my worrying-about-you quota for the next, oh, couple years.”

  “I have superpowers.”

  I blinked.

  Way to raise the bar, dude.

  “Okay, so maybe I wasn’t clear—I meant worrying about your physical health. Worrying about your mental health is an entirely different issue, and—”

  “You said that you saw it. You saw my hand.” She held it up, and it looked completely normal. Her hand had definitely been blue when she put it behind her back, but I wasn’t about to chalk it up to superpowers. That was ridiculous.

  I mean, I like to consider myself open-minded, but seriously?

  “So was that electricity, then?”

  “Wait—you believe me?” Her eyebrows shot up, along with the corners of her mouth.

  I shrugged. “Not really, to be honest, but I mean…I don’t think you’re lying. I think I’m having a really weird dream.”

  She held up her hand again, with the open doorway still separating us, and I saw little arcs of blue electricity zap around her hand, going from finger to finger and jumping out of one part of her palm to hit another spot a half-inch away. It was bizarre—like blue gnats were swarming around her hand. By all rights, she should have been screaming in pain, but it didn’t look like it was hurting her at all.

  My arm hairs were sticking out on end, and when I moved, my sweater sent a static shock to my wrist. It didn’t make sense—she was the one generating the field of electricity, yet her hair didn’t seem to be trying to get away from her head.

  “You think this is a dream? Dude, I’ve been like this for two days.”

  “Okay, well…now for the million-dollar question…”

  “How the hell did this happen?”

  “That would be it.”

  “No idea.”

  “None whatsoever?”

  “Nope. I noticed it yesterday at work.”

  “As in when you woke up after you died from electrocution?” I closed my eyes, trying hard not to roll them. I didn’t want to annoy her, but…I couldn’t accept this, even having seen her and felt the electricity in the air. It was just too weird.

  “Y-yes. I’ve never heard of this as a symptom of electrocution, though.”

  Okay, now I did roll my eyes. “I have a feeling we would have heard about it if this was common.”

  The longer this lasted, the more I convinced myself it wasn’t a dream. I decided, for now, to act like her power was completely real because I couldn’t see any other explanation, e
xcept maybe that I was dreaming but hadn’t woken up yet. No point in ruining my fun.

  “What can you do?” I asked. “I saw you trying to…I guess trying to shoot something? Can you control how much it’s outside your skin? It—”

  “Holy crap, Jesse. Let me answer one question at a time, would you?”

  I stopped to catch my breath. I’d gotten better about letting people get a word in edgewise, but I was a little excited.

  “Okay. So, uh. What can you do?”

  “I…I can do a few things. I dunno.”

  “Well, obviously you do know, so…”

  She held up a finger.

  Drama queen.

  She raised her eyebrow and waited a beat for a reaction to…nothing, as far as I could tell.

  “Yes?”

  “Look at my hand, idiot.”

  I looked down, yelped, and recoiled backwards a step. I’d seen the electricity around her hand before, but it was going to take a while for me to get used to it. It was fascinating to watch but bizarre to try to wrap my head around.

  “Well, shit.” I walked closer, going through the opening so that we were both on the porch. Immediately, I felt my hair being tugged all over my body, and it was strong enough to make me queasy. It reminded me of how Holly used to describe walking through the hydro field and why she always took an alternate route home.

  Well, almost always, I guess.

  “So?”

  “That’s amazing!” I reached out to touch her, but as I got closer, the blue electricity disappeared.

  “What the hell, Jesse? Are you fucking stupid?” She smacked the side of my head—hand free of electricity, of course. I almost retaliated but calmed down in an instant when I realized she was pissed. When I thought about it, I couldn’t exactly blame her.

  I smiled sheepishly, my own anger completely gone. “Sorry. Wasn’t thinking.”

  “Clearly. Aren’t you supposed to be the sane one?”

  I laughed. “Well, I think by this point, we’re both a little insane.”

  “What do you mean?” She was still holding up her hand and was making the blue glow appear and then disappear while we were talking. It was really distracting—I couldn’t take my eyes off of it.

  “I mean we’re talking about superpowers, Holly. Like they’re real. We have to be crazy.” I coughed, trying not to laugh. “What is it that you can do with them, anyway? Can you actually shoot a lightning bolt?”

  She nodded. This is so cool. I could only hope it wasn’t a dream. I was way too excited to wake up now.

  “Show me.”

  She rolled her eyes at the tone of my voice and then motioned for me to get behind her—with the non-glowing hand, which amused me a little despite the fact that, y’know, it was the safe hand at this point. As I stepped behind her, she pointed with one finger like a kid pretending to hold a gun.

  “Do you seriously have to do that?” I didn’t even bother trying to keep the laughter out of my voice.

  “Shh.”

  “Lamest-looking superpower ever, if you do.”

  “Would you shut up?”

  I leaned on one foot and waited in silence for a moment. She either wasn’t really good at this or was going for as high a sense of drama as was possible. Maybe a combination of the two.

  She motioned like she was “shooting” with her “gun,” and a tiny lightning bolt shot out in the direction she was pointing, going about a foot before disappearing. She turned to me, disappointment clear on her face. Her eyes were still lit up with excitement, but she was scowling.

  “That’s…that’s about all I can do right now. I did better last—err, before. Earlier.” She blinked and looked away, towards the other end of the deck.

  “Well, you…you can vary the glow, right?”

  “The what?”

  “The electricity around your hand. You can shape that, right? Make it grow, make it shrink?”

  “Yeah.”

  Okay, this was something I could sink my teeth into—I had lots of training. Theoretically speaking, of course. “Try focusing it in the palm of your hand instead of around a finger. It’s a bigger area, and there’s a better connection to your energy there than in your fingertip.” She gave me a strange look, and I shrugged. “They mention the concept of qi a lot in martial arts. It’s essentially energy, so I assume that’s what you’re playing with when you’re using your ‘power.’ Or it’s close enough. Plus, y’know…superheroes.”

  She was still giving me that look.

  “Try it,” I encouraged. I wasn’t one hundred percent sure it would work, but I figured it was worth a shot. Worst-case scenario was that I was wrong, which was entirely possible, given that superpowers don’t exist.

  Or that’s what anyone else would tell you.

  She sucked in breath, and I saw the glow around her palm grow brighter—a lot brighter than it had been around her finger when she’d let off that bolt.

  “Like this?”

  I reached out and grabbed her finger and felt the energy in the air, but because it was all focused in her palm, none of it hurt me as she attempted to jerk her hand away.

  I’d braced for it, but I was still more than a little relieved not to have to deal with any pain. I held her palm face up.

  “Yeah, that looks—look at your hand, Holly.” She’d closed her eyes and turned her head away when I’d grabbed her fingers.

  She opened her eyes, and they widened when she saw what I was pointing out. “Well, shit.”

  “Yeah. That looks like a lot more than was around your finger, so now point with your palm instead of your hand, like…” I settled into a basic stance, glad for my training, and held out my palm as if I were motioning for someone to stop.

  I waited and nodded when she moved her hand and arm to match mine. Mostly.

  Close enough.

  “Okay, and instead of doing that weird…motion like a kid shooting a gun, just think of it as releasing the energy away from you.”

  “You do realize just how insane you sound, right?”

  “I’m sorry, which one of us is currently holding a ball of electricity in her hand after dying yesterday?”

  “Touché.” She grinned, and I grinned back. It was times like these that you could really tell the two of us were siblings.

  I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

  “Okay, so you can push forward a little bit. That will probably help you mentally, for releasing the energy.”

  “How come I didn’t know you were into all this stuff?”

  “Save question hour. Shoot it!” It wasn’t common for me to shout at Holly; usually, it was the other way around, especially in the past few years, since I’d started taking a couple different martial arts as part of the anger management program. When I did shout, though, it tended to get her attention, and it worked this time. Her mouth snapped shut, and she pushed forward with her hand.

  “Nothing happened.”

  “Did you think about releasing the energy?”

  “What does that even mean, though?”

  “Try visualizing it. Think a hadouken.”

  She raised an eyebrow, and I could see the corners of her mouth creeping up.

  Oh, no.

  “Holly, please don’t—”

  “Hadouken!” She yelled the Japanese word that we only knew from video games, but amusingly enough, it worked! A bluish bolt of lightning shot about fifteen feet through the air, passing between two of the railings of the back porch to hit the grass.

  I peeked over the railings to examine the damage. “Okay, so we need to work on your aim.”

  “We?”

  I was hoping she’d catch that.

  “Congratulations, you have a personal trainer.” I reached out my hand, mockingly professional, and she tried to wipe the grin off her face—and the electricity off her hand—before she shook it.

  “Deal.”

  Chapter Eleven: Holly

  “Okay, so this is ju
st very basic meditation, but it’s kind of the basis for any sort of energy work. Everyone does it—”

  I held up a hand as if I were in school—I guess at this point, I kind of was, or in class at least—and he stopped and gave me a strange look.

  “Question—you never answered me before, just told me to shut up and shoot. How come I didn’t know about your interest in all this stuff?”

  He shrugged, clearly feeling awkward. Huh. “I dunno—it was part of my martial arts training and my anger management training, which we didn’t really talk about that much, and then by the time we would’ve talked about it, it would’ve been either me being too excited about something that you wouldn’t have understood because you haven’t done anything with energy work before, or it would have seemed…” He shrugged again, and looked down at the ground. “I dunno—too New Age-y for you.”

  I laughed. I couldn’t even really argue because it was true. If I didn’t have electricity playing around my skin, I don’t think I would’ve been so quick to try what Jesse was suggesting.

  “I guess. Okay, so…” We were sitting cross-legged in our backyard, and I was wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt and my pyjama pants. I was very, very grateful right now that it had warmed up a bit. I was still a little chilly, but I couldn’t see my breath anymore.

  Jesse had gone all out and was wearing a thin T-shirt and his karate pants, as I usually called them. I’m not actually sure what types of martial arts he studied—I thought there were at least a couple, though. He looked comfortable, and despite wearing less than I was, he didn’t seem cold at all.

  “What now?” I asked.

  He opened his eyes and sighed. “First of all, shush. Meditation is relaxation taken to the next level. It’s really easy, but one of the most important things is to be as quiet as possible.”

  I wasn’t sure if he was saying that because that’s what they’d taught him or if he was saying it to shut me up, but I couldn’t really argue either way, so I breathed in deeply and shut my mouth.

  “Okay,” he said, closing his eyes. “The foundation of meditation is controlling your breathing. Your heartbeat and thought processes all take cues from your breathing. When you breathe quickly, your heart races, and generally you think more. When you slow down your breathing, taking deep, controlled, measured breaths, your heart slows down, and you stop thinking so much.”