In The Middle, Somewhat Elevated | An Avengers Fanfiction |

Chapter 1: Eidos Telos

Steam drifted through sunlight, rising from my homemade latte, as a small mountain town slowly woke up. Aspen leaves fluttered in the slight breeze, shushing the bees that were fast at work on all the flowers that had survived last night's freeze. The cottonwoods were in full bloom, releasing tiny white tufts into the blue sky, like summer snow.

I sat with my feet tucked up on the chair, willfully ignoring the time while watching runners huffed it uphill towards the mountain for a grueling workout. The early sun warmed my knees and forehead and glittered off of bikes and windshields in the street below. I shut my eyes, wishing I could crawl back into my dark room and soft bed.

A summer music student's violin warm-up drifted across the street sweetly, intermingling with my mother's anxious voice coming from the open window behind me.

"...sent Angela over to water, but everything so just so dry this year and it looks so bad yesterday that I just told her to leave the sprinklers on for a couple hours."

The tension in her voice was familiar; she always seemed to be worried about something. If it wasn't my aging stepdad's heath, it was my career, or the threat of plastics leaching toxins into our food, or the smell of the carpet in her room.

"It just didn't look as good as I know you like it and I was worried for your irises. Yes. Ok, I will. I will, I will. Ok. Mmm bye." I heard the chirp as she turned off the handheld.

"Honey, are you keeping an eye on your time?" The porch door opened, lightly bumping my chair.

"Yes," I lied, quickly opening my eyes and sitting up straight.

"Bag packed?"

I pressed my lips together in a ghost of a smile.

"Fine, fine," she squawked at me and took the chair opposite mine. "Oh, honey," she pulled my half-eaten soggy cereal across the table and peered into the bowl. "This isn't the organic kind. I told Angela to get the good kind with organic sugar and no gluten. Didn't you see it in there?" She didn't wait for my reply. "You look tired. Didn't you sleep well?"

"I slept fine," I lied. My dreams had woken me up more than once with a pounding heart, but I wasn't about to tell her that. Without a doubt, I'd be force-fed a lumpy supplement-packed protein shake.

She looked at me for a long time, as if considering calling out my lie. I held her gaze and was struck again by how beautiful she was. She could make anyone look dull standing next to her. Including me. Her skin was smooth and clear, her eyes an inhuman shade green, her auburn hair was long and full, and her body as lithe as a twenty-year-old's. Decades of expensive self-care and good genes kept her so young that she could be my sister. Except that I had blue eyes, dirty blonde hair, and freckly skin and looked nothing like her. There was good reason for that; I was adopted.

"I talked to Gigi this morning and she gave me the daily farm report." She began plucking the dead parts off the flowers that hung limply from the flower boxes that line the railing of our second-story porch.

"Rod Stewart died."

I gave her a look.

"Not the actor. The chicken. You know the black and white polish rooster with the feathers," she stuck her hands on top of her head as if her fingers were a wild hairstyle.

"Isn't Rod Stewart a singer?"

"Well," she continued. "Rod died and you know how he was the king of the roost. Flower was his girlfriend, the pretty white chicken with the huge tan eggs, and she would even stand up to Placido Domingo, the other rooster, and peck the others to keep Rod safe. Well since Rod died I don't know how. Gigi didn't know either. He seemed too young, you know, in the prime of his rooster life, on top of the world with a hot girlfriend. So now the other chickens have ganged up on Flower and have pecked her so bad. Gigi thinks she will die if she sticks Flower back in the coop. But anyway Flower escaped, flew the coop and was waiting for Gigi on the doorstep, like, 'take me in, the other chickens hate me!' Isn't that awful?"