Long distance, pt.VIII

There’s this old Justice League antagonist from back in the early ‘60s and he was called Amazo the Amazing Android. The thing that made Amazo absolutely fascinating was that he had these super-absorption cells that would enable him to actually mimic the powers of every Leaguer: The Flash’s speed, Green Lantern’s wish-ring, Superman’s invulnerability and so on, and so forth.
As silly as it sounds Amazo’s promise was one of utter and absolute freedom for anyone willing to hear his message: Being able to become anyone, being able to survive anywhere, to blend in, to fit in, to belong somewhere or to someone for the fleetest of the stories.

…This is mine:

Despite her kid brother playing guardian angel on steroids it still leaves me room to maneuver when she asks about the Thirty-Seven and I tell her I did it mostly to meet girls. She obviously doesn’t buy it but smiles anyway when I say I should’ve gone with a story about adopting orphans from war-torn African countries instead. It’s then & there I realize her eyes are of the most beautiful green.
We’re standing in the middle of the crowd, see, waiting for the second band to come onstage and then she bows down and says, Check this out man. She pulls her blond hair off the back of her head, there’s this small tattoo of a dog on her neck.
She looks up, smiles again, and this is the part I sort of forgot to tell you about how Amazo would also absorb the weaknesses of the Justice League. The music here is just terrible but what the hey, now, we’re all ballplaying in one or another… And in Green Lantern’s case Amazo was made absolutely vulnerable to yellow and this is me too with my thing with blondes, anyhow…


The following evening this other girl takes me out to dinner, to try the local cuisine, and she’s also got some pretty eyes, also green, but this one’s a brunette and from when we’re talking she says she almost got married to this guy once, then lets out she’s actually twenty and I’m thinking, Nope, too young. Bail out.
The local cuisine tastes… interesting, though, and I manage to survive the crabs and the oysters and god forbid, the a**** without having any bowel complications the next morning. “You sure can take it, man”, she says afterwards.
“I’ve got a tenth-level Mohs-scale inner stomach lining,” I say. She has absolutely no idea of what I’m talking but then asks me about the Thirty-Seven and what do you know, there just could be the ball rolling once more… in spite of myself, however.