prompt: alchemy, title: half lives in misc. flash fiction

Everyone wants the easy way out and I’m no different. I have a ticket for tonight’s lottery, even though the odds are six-hundred-million-to-one. Someone has to win eventually, why not throw two bucks away for a half-week of hope? It was that or a fast-food coffee. Better for my heart.

Everybody wants superhuman powers like a comic-book hero, even though we all possess them, they just take too long or cost too much. We shapeshift, we all do, from child to adult to corpse, we get fat, we go gray, our organs wear out. We can’t control it, of course, to become sexy or to stay young, it careens like a freight-train sans engineer but it sure as hell happens. I can send my thoughts across the planet at the speed of light, even though I’m no cinema telepath, it’s just not as simple as putting fingers to temples and squinting like Patrick Stewart. I take a five-hundred-dollar slab out of my pocket, that I pay fifty bucks every month to make actually function, then I thumb in my words and hit “send” like a trained ape but it certainly works. Someone in Germany instantly knows which pitcher I think the Mets need to sign this off-season. That’s a superpower.

People want to learn alchemy, how to transform lead into gold, but with the right super-collider, enough money and time, we could make that happen. Just smash enough of the fundamental bits of reality together, scrape off some atoms here, an electron there, your lead is now gold. It’d take millions of dollars, dozens of scientists and would cost exponentially more than that new gold’s market value but you could do it. It’d still be a miracle. But there’s no profit in that, of course.

You could watch uranium transmute to lead yourself, with the right kind of eyes and God’s scale of time, but we as women and men don’t get those eyes, we do not get that time. We bathe in the residue of miracles each moment, but we’re too busy keeping ourselves upright and have far too short lives to see them. The tricks we use to distract us from the pluriform despair of this mayfly existence, the lotto tickets, the comic-book movies, the left-handed set-up relievers still out there on the free-agent market, they do also distract us from those miracles too infinitesimal or too vast to comprehend with our wee monkey minds and our ninety-years’ time if we are even that lucky.

It’d be nice to have it easy for once, though, wouldn’t it? To have that economic “get out of jail free” card. To be able to fly. Then again, I could fly tomorrow if I had seven hundred dollars to spend. I could drive to the airport just then soar away. But that wouldn’t be magical so I would probably just bitch and moan about how long I had to wait there in line. God help me, I am no different than anyone.