It’s Been Super is a fragment by Jack Rusher, published here Saturday, January 31, 2004. It is part of Stories.
The end of a month of mayhem.
It’s eight o’ clock and the usual lizards are trickling into my local. They stretch out on the smooth surface of the bar, a hand hewn plank of Douglas Fir, to rest and drink. Frankie, the barmaid, has a super power: her smile sends out beams of light that are able to warm the innards of men and beasts. The lizards are here because she is here, their exothermic bodies hungry for her radiance.
We’re seated at our usual corner table, tequilas all around, discussing our own super powers, what they’re worth to us and what we would do if we had each other’s talents.
After an escalating round of boasts we decide to play a game wherein we trade powers. Alex borrows my extraordinary hubris, Paul tries out my foolhardy insouciance, and I get a dose of Paul’s smooth prose line. I try to use Alex’s perfect bilingualism, but I can’t quite figure out how — super powers, sadly, do not come with instructions.
We grow drunker and drunker and ever more daring. Paul starts using my Svengali’s gaze to convince random women to disrobe and dance on table tops; Alex begins work on a semantic web framework using Paul’s expertise; I construct a traditional Kazakh yurt.
While seated with a group of naked hipster chicks in the yurt that we’ve pitched upon a semantic web framework, we realize that the game is over, that it will soon be dawn and that we all have things to do in the morning.
We end the game, give back our borrowed gifts and wander off to our separate homes.