Giant

Chapter 1.

There’s a giant leading me to God knows where
I’ve got news, I’m going my way
Fighting, and I feel I’m getting somewhere
All is right, all is right.

From high atop the water tower on the very edge of town, a shadow sat, pushing up her glasses as they fell slightly down the bridge of her nose. Just below, an entire city stretched out toward the sea, the lights bleeding into it, which then bled into the horizon, into the very sky itself. Down by the boardwalk, someone was throwing away old bread and cotton candy while the gulls gulped them down with contented caws that got lodged in their noses. The smell of the freshly cut, end-of-summer lawns wafted through the night, perfuming the last night of summer break perfectly.

Long legs kicked in the night as she leaned back on her elbows and listened to the house down on Juniper Street with the old couple who put on records and let Mr. Johnny Cooltrane wail through the open windows as the screens exhaled with each note so that the porch filled with the sound of summer and mingled with the creak of the ceiling fan that did nothing but push around the warm water. They drank mint juleps and complained about the state of the world before the rocking chair sang along.

At her own home, she could hear the way her adoptive mother hummed to herself as she washed the dishes while her sister typed another email to their father. Up in the hill, in the gated world, a family fought, down on Main Street someone got angry and argued with a parking attendant. Just a few blocks away, a tiny voice prayed for good things and a new bike.

From her spot, her tiny throne, unbeknownst to all the living souls beneath, Kara looked up at the stars and breathed in her last few breaths of summer before the inevitable prison of school came to trap her once again, one final time.

She lasted as long as she could, listening and watching, until she heard the telltale noise of her mother finishing up and letting the dog out, the final steps of her routine. With a sigh, she stood and dusted off the dirt from her thighs before taking off with almost a crack in the air. She flew so high, she could see four towns over, see the mountains, see the lakes beyond them before breaking off and lazily gliding backwards toward her home.

The thing with growing, with really coming into her powers over the past few months, since the last round of holidays, was that Kara had never experienced power like this. Gifted as she’d always been, when her cousin warned her of what was to come, she almost didn’t believe him. And then she threw a tennis ball so far, it was never seen again one evening when taking Boomer to the dog park. And then she ripped the steering wheel off in a fit of road rage. And then she ran to Alaska in under an hour.

Unpredictable surges would happen, flare up, even, and then sometimes they would dissipate to nothing at all. Which was never that big of a deal, unless she was flying, as she was on her way home.

It wasn’t like a prop plane, running out of gas like on Indiana Jones, she realized as soon as it happened. There was no sputtering and no warning light flashing on the dashboard. Instead, there was just falling, graceless and messy, limbs flailing as she bit back swearing and tried to will it back.

And then there was a wall, a thick, hearty, brick and ivy kind of wall that she landed into back first and upside down, though she didn’t do the math until she realized she was laying in the rubble and lifted her head to survey the damage.

With a cough, dust and dirt tried to leave her lungs and dry throat as she took stock of her limbs and senses as best she could.

“Mom’s going to be so mad,” she sighed, letting her head drop so that she looked upside down at the hole.

In the distance she could hear the sound of a golf cart approaching, a radio signal that referenced an alarm being tripped at the Luthor residence. With a groan, Kara winced and tried to pick herself up, stumbling slightly in the rubble.