The Discontinued Adventures of Superman and Crispin

by Charlie Galbraith

Arthur Scullery was in the bath when he got the call. He was so surprised and excited by the news that he accidentally jerked the phone into the bathwater, electrocuting himself and blowing every fuse in the house. At least that was the story as Arthur told it. He was no stranger to fabrication; in fact the two were very well acquainted.
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ﬡ: “Jews just don’t get tattoos,” Raizel spat, arm stretched. “Well, traditional Jews. Orthodox Jews. They just don’t do it.”

But Raizel clearly didn’t give a damn. Well, of course she gave a damn. With a name like Raizel Rosengarten, you couldn’t not give a damn somewhere. Your life-story was all about trying not to give a damn when really you did.

It turned out to be a beautiful thing—the tattoo, that is. It grazed across the length of her forearm, wrapping itself around in a serpentine clutch.

“Why, a yiddishe tattoo for a yiddishe gal. Look at that.”

Her opiod receptors are blown. There is only so much relief a body is built to take, her doctor tells her. As she fills out the hospice forms, she makes a mental list of things she would’ve rather allotted her life’s pleasures to: afternoons spent eating cherries and brownie batter, the encyclopedia of textures of skins of the world that she never got to touch. Are there equations in this? Could she have traded the gardens of heirloom tomatoes she grew every summer for forty years for the ability to walk on her cancer softened hips? please god please god please god, i’ll trade you the four nights when i was nineteen i couldn’t sleep for laughing, the pair of red soled shoes i had when i was thirty and… Judah realizes she doesn’t have anything else in her life that she could trade with god. She wishes for two pain free months, three weeks, a hundred minutes. She wishes she had had a daughter. She wishes the cancer hadn’t metastized. She doesn’t know a god who would give her any of this.

 brown mary, the only choice
on out; the only thing to stick
vigilant's beyond me, just like old brother Frank said.
 OmnipOtent wOrdplay what's real what
is nofabrication.  so schooleft him slower than
an interview might (imply)suggest.