prompt: stop, title: the kurtzberg account in misc. flash fiction

“What happened to my powers?” The intrusive thought sped through her mind from time to time. She had no idea where it could’ve come from, but each and every time, she pushed it down and away because it just sounded crazy. “What happened to my powers?”

“A childish fantasy of grandiose significance,” her shrink would say, “nothing more. Your life seems small compared to movies so your subconscious confects this story. But your life is good. It matters. Focus on the significance of your real life, instead.” Which would be great advice to most, but for her it was complicated, because until a few years back, she’d really been tossing Buicks like medicine balls, she’d really been zipping around stars. She’d been a superhero. At the edge of dreams, she could feel her hands tingling, channeling energies from the ether into devastating cosmic blasts. Doc suggested testing for carpal tunnel.

Around the fortieth nearly-galaxy-ending conflagration, the leaders of the powered community realized they had to put a stop to it, once and for all. Such delirious ability in so few flawed-and-human hands was never going to end well. There’d always be another meta-crisis, another super war. With all that power cycling recycled revenge, eventually at some point the bad guys would win or the goodies would mess up even worse. There wouldn’t be a universe left to defend.

They pooled their reality-bending skills together to undo their majesty. Unravel the magic that made them small-g gods, all memories of the fantastic things they’d been. They freed humanity, now themselves included, to move forward in their little ways, doom by tiny doom, triumph by tiny triumph. No more crisis-war crossovers outside mortal hands, just tiny lives, tiny deaths.

The only ones left with full cognition of the whole mess were the psychologists attending to the minds which had once been capable of undoing Pax Universalis, just in case. Some artsy-fartsy-types retained subconscious recollection of that once heroically horrifying world, sure, but their comic books and blockbuster movies reinforced the notion it was just pulp pablum.

Still, there were echoes of that great and terrible existence she’d lost to the routine and mundane left behind, just strong enough to occasionally ask “What happened to my powers?” “That’s just the fight with your husband talking,” the doctor would say, “that’s just the stress of handling the Kurtzberg Account. We make up fantasies when we want that easy way out. It’s normal.” The therapist wanted to tell her she’d done the most heroic thing of all by letting all those technicolor disasters to fade into myth, but she knew she couldn’t. She knew it’d be too tempting, the ability to change the entire world, to shoot lasers from your eyes, to fly.

“You’re doing so much more, living in the real” she’d tell her and she wasn’t exactly lying. She wasn’t completely lying. But still, that therapist had to wonder, what it must have been like to go and willingly give up your wings.