A Scholarly Article on Doc Stalwart

"Classic Archetypes in Modern Graphic Narratives:

Doc Stalwart and The Odyssey"

Published in the American Journal of Archetypes and Modern Literature, Summer 1986

By Dr. Mike Desing

 

“Comics aren’t just for kids anymore!” (always with an exclamation point) has already metamorphosed from a well-intentioned acknowledgement of the maturity capable of the graphic narrative art form into something of a cliche. It presupposes a claim: that at some point comics were the exclusive (or even primary) domain of youthful immaturity and simple storytelling. Comics have always been, and will always be, a narrative medium designed to appeal to a wide range of readers, presenting complex concepts in simple, iconic, and symbolic forms. All great art throughout human history has attempted, on some level, to do the same, placing the graphic narrative in elite company, without any additional epiphanies on our part needed to place it there.
 
Such is the case of a narrative form we generally acknowledge today as ‘high art’, the Epic Poetry of Homer’s day. Homer composed his narratives to engage his audience, entertain, and to (most importantly) hook them so that they’d continue to invest in the narrative over extended time. He told of sweeping adventure, larger-than-life exploits, and dangers beyond the ken of his audience. He tapped into his audience’s collective superstitions and fears, their hopes and their trepidations about what lingered beyond the pale, and synthesized these into a rousing tale. This is no more, and no less, than the current graphic narrative artform seeks to accomplish. In fact, this essay argues that the current comic series from New Stalwart Press, the Mighty Doc Stalwart, is the closest current graphic narrative to the spirit of Homer’s own works, particularly the Odyssey. 
 
The protagonists of the two texts are mirror images. Both are great warriors, exceptional athletes, and accomplished leaders. Each achieves feats of strength and bravery and skill that are beyond the capacity of their peers. Each is the subject of the desire of women and the adoration of men. However, each is defined, more than by these physical gifts, by his mind. Homer always affixes the adjective ‘clever’ to Odysseus, such that he is often referred to as ‘the Clever Odysseus’. And, while Doc Stalwart is known as ‘the Mighty Doc Stalwart’, his adventures, far more often than not, rely on his quick mind to overcome his challenges. 
 
At its core, the Odyssey is a story of a clever hero who seeks, above all else, to return home. On first blush, this would seem a divergence from the tales of the modern Doc Stalwart. However, home is - in its broadest sense - where you are from. It is where you can unearth the roots of your childhood. It is the place where you are most at ease - maybe the only place where you can truly ever be at ease. However, as Odysseus realizes on a subconscious level, as all great protagonists from Jason to Hamlet to Frodo Baggins to Anakin Skywalker learn as well, you cannot rest until the work is finished. For Doc Stalwart, this work is the ultimate victory of science and knowledge over ignorance and fear. His home is Meridian - a place of peace, of solitude. It is where he is ‘born’ (gaining the abilities that make him into Doc Stalwart), and the place he sometimes seeks respite from the weariness of the world. He only spends a relatively short part of his career there before setting off into the larger world. Over the decades that Doc’s adventures have been published, he has ever traveled further and further afield of this home, making his return seem ever the more implausible. This directly parallels the journeys of Odysseus, who seeks more than anything a return to Ithaca, yet continually finds himself further and further from it. It is thoughts of Ithaca, her mountain spires, her hardy shores, her stalwart people, that sustain in ways that food or comfort never can. Doc Stalwart finds some respite in his childhood memories, but these are invariably short-lived, overwhelmed by the work before him. For both heroes, there is ever more work before them, and more adventures to face.
 
And what adventures these are. Odysseus travels the limits of his own world, and far beyond, exploring beyond the scope of human imagination, into realms beyond his audience’s perception. In the case of Odysseus, his tools are the natural world; ships he crafts of pine, the wind he marshals in his sails, the forested roads he travels, and the pristine rivers he navigates. He visits gods and monsters, seeing the beginnings and ends of his world, and the lands of death itself. His voyages lead, ever and always, into the supernatural lands - fortresses and caves and grottos and fields inhabited by the unknown and mysterious world. 
 
Thus is the case of Doc Stalwart, who leverages science instead of nature, since his world is rooted in science in the same manner Odysseus’, and by extension Homer’s, was rooted in nature. For Doc Stalwart, it is futuristic craft and cosmic platforms, jet packs and energy gateways that take him into the lands supernatural. But in all these places, he (as Odysseus did) sees echoes of his family, and thoughts of them set his course anew. 
 
This may be the greatest parallel between these two texts. Both are stories of a father facing the dangers of the world, and its myriad temptations, with home always drawing him back onto his path. For the Greeks, Odysseus is defined as much by his family as anything else. His faithful wife Penelope remains at home, weaving a loom over a duration of decades to deter the suitors who hound her daily. His son, the noble Telemachus, maintains his father’s home and keeps his throne at the ready for his father’s return. Even Odysseus’ own father lingers in poverty at the fringes of society, carried forward only by the hope of one day seeing his son again. It is a story of a man, his family, and the generations before and after him.
 
Doc Stalwart borrows the same motifs, albeit twisted into tragic form. His wife, faithful and dedicated, dies to protect him and his unborn daughter. His father, in spirit if not in biology, is the noble Heartland, now a bearded pauper adrift on a lost island among tribal men. He has no son, but he has a nephew. A son always represents the future in a symbolic way; Doc’s surrogate nephew the Stalwart Kid literally goes into the future to destroy it, symbolizing the greatest fear of any parent, that their children will reject their teachings. Even Doc’s daughter, who is the surrogate for Telemachus in this narrative, is faithful to her father in deed, but also sets out, as all children must in our world, to find themselves. Doc is faithful to them all, but each, in their own way, is not able to return his stalwart faithfulness. While we know that Odysseus’ final homecoming is eternal, we also recognize, despite the fact that his story is not yet finished, that Doc’s can never be.
 
The greatest evidence we have of the archetypal rather than derivative nature of this journey is, thankfully, the creators themselves. While we only can know Homer by the handful of narratives that have been flavored and distilled and interpreted by hundreds of other skilled storytellers, we have the source of Doc Stalwart’s world - a handful of creative men. These three men, Lee Stanford, Kirby Jackson, and (most recently) Byron John, have collaborated on the sprawling tale of Doc Stalwart. You can scour their offices and their interviews for mentions of Odysseus. There are the occasional glimpses into a possible influence. An offhand allusion to the Odyssey here and there. A joke in an interview about “well, I’m no Homer” on the part of Lee Stanford. But there is scant evidence of an intentionality on the part of the creators to hew close to the classic epic. Instead, it appears more likely that, as is true of archetypal literature on the whole, these creatives have tapped into the same wellspring of creative thought that has prompted texts from the Odyssey to Moby Dick. It may be time we decide that Doc Stalwart deserves a place not only in the same library as these texts, but on the same bookshelf.
 

Dr. Mike Desing is an Assistant Professor of Literature at Tolkien University. While he doesn’t get invited to many scholarly parties, he’s okay with that - he’d rather be at the comic book store anyway. He has been called ‘the world’s greatest Doc Stalwart Scholar’, which is easy enough when nobody else is vying for the title.

the Byron John Interview

“The Byron John Interview”

From the Comics Inquirer 255 (August 1985)

The last time I interviewed Byron John was just over a year ago. He was in the final days of his work on the book that made him a living legend: The Mighty Doc Stalwart #250. He had obsessed over this one story for months, working diligently to get ahead of his workflow so that he would have the time to get this massive anniversary issue done. He was a focused and dedicated creator, no doubt. But he was also angry. Tired. In some ways, now that I look back, I can see the frantic pace and terrible pressure had made its way into the book. It is Doc pushed to his absolute limits, and its creator had, in his own way, endured the same thing.

So, it was very surprising to me that the Byron John who opened the door when I arrived for this interview was… relaxed. He seemed content. Affable. The occasion was, in and of itself, remarkable. He was releasing his first comic in over a year: the first issue of Skye Stalwart, the Girl Who Fell To Earth. 

He welcomed me into his own Secret Lab: his studio. The covers of every issue of Doc Stalwart he did were framed, filling an entire wall. His desk was clean, a single piece of illustration board ready for the pencil. His shelves had comics, of course, but also collections of Greek Myth and Shakespeare. He offered me a cup of tea.

Interviewer: Well, YOU seem relaxed!

Byron John: (laughs) being relaxed will make you look that way.

I: This is different… from…

B: Don’t I know it. It’s been. It’s been a year.

I: So you’re working on Skye Stalwart now. I wonder how that came to be.

B: If you told me a year ago that I’d be here, now, doing this. I never would have believed you.

I: What changed?

B: Everything. I mean, after the release party for Doc 250, my wife pulled me aside and told me that we were pregnant. She was three months along. Abigail was born in March.

I: Congratulations. That has to be a new experience.

B: It changed me. It changed everything. 

I: How do you mean?

B: When I finished my run on Doc–

I: A legendary run, I might add…

B: Kind of you to say. But when I finished, I was DONE. I had been fighting for years to protect that book, those characters, from interference. I think it is documented that I had a few conflicts with editorial staff…

I: (laughs) I hadn’t heard about that.

B: (laughs) I was pretty subtle about it. So, after years of public war with my own editors, I was ready to leave. But I wasn’t ready to let it go. So, in my own way, I went out kicking and screaming. And I spent a few months in a funk. But then… Abigail. And. I don’t know. I just couldn’t look at the world through that angry lens anymore.

I: That’s good. I’m glad. 

B: Thank you. So, there came a day, maybe two months after she came home, where I thought about Doc. I wondered what he’d been up to.

I: You hadn’t followed the comic after you left?

B: (laughs) God no! Doc was my first child, in some ways, and the thought of someone else parenting him and his book was just. I couldn’t handle it. It felt unfair. But, I had a pile of unopened envelopes that the creative team had sent me. Each issue, they’d sent me an overnight copy of the new issue the moment it came off the press. But I had not been able to bring myself to open them.

I: They probably wondered why you didn’t write back (laughs).

B: Yeah. (laughs). Probably did. So I peeled open those envelopes and lined up the books and read them.

I: And?

B: I was. Stunned. I had been worried that they would either completely mimic everything I’d done for years and just recycle it, or that they’d simply cast it all aside and pretend I’d never been involved. Either option was just as unsettling.

I: But?

B: It was this… love letter. To Stanford and Jackson. To me. To comics in general. Their work showed a reverence and a respect but also a dedication to craft. I just… I really loved their work. I loved the story they were telling. Then I read the letters and… well, I will say that their words brought me so much. Healing I guess.

I: Wow.

B: Right. And so, I spent the rest of the night writing them a letter back. I sent it, and felt incredible. I had moved on. I had let Doc go. I could really turn the page and do something else.

I: And that something else is Skye Stalwart (laughs)? That’s not much different…
B: No. That was the last - no. But, a few days letter, I got an invitation. Stalwart Press was hosting a Doc summit - the new creative team, me, the widow of Jackson… they wanted us all together. I hesitated, but (my wife) Margot said I should go. So, I did.

I: And?

B: They floated out their next storyline… how Doc recovers his daughter. And they said that they had ways to include her in the story going forward, but they wanted my input. And Beatrice (Kirby Jackson’s widow)... they wanted to know what we thought. They felt like this was such a - such a big change. They were concerned with honoring the history. And I was all for it. I loved the idea. We did some collaborative brainstorming and ate some incredible Filet Mignon (laughs). They knew how to get my attention, I guess.

I: That will do it.

B: And at the end of the night, they had taken a complete 180 on their plans. The original plan was that the book would become a team up book between Doc and his daughter. But we’d discussed how she had to find herself on her own. That seemed more authentic. And we talked about her having her own book. And I was all for that. Liked the idea. And then they just offered me the book. But it was going to be completely mine. No editorial influence. They guaranteed me complete creative control. As long as sales justified it, they would publish the book for as long as I wanted to do it, in any format I chose. There were a handful of characters that they asked me not to use, because they had plans for them, but I was free to pull from anything in Doc’s history, or to build my own new history. 

I: That had to be a great feeling.

B: Kid in a candy store. So I got to work. And, I mean, it just flowed.

I: Like riding a bike?

B: Like riding a bike. I was in the same world, the world I knew so well, but suddenly had this open road before me. Locating her on the other side of the country and just giving her this totally blank slate to work from. It was liberating. Still is.

I: The future?

B: I committed to a four-issue storyline. It’s a limited series right now… but I’m working on issue three, and I’m starting to see ways to keep this story going… threads I’m not going to wrap up. And, to be honest, I’m having a lot of fun. So, I think it’s likely I just keep going after number four.

I: Well, college isn’t cheap, from what I hear.

B: Right. I do have a job again. I think my wife likes that (laughs). She no longer has to tell people she’s married to an unemployed cartoonist (laughs).

I: That’s not impressive?

B: I guess not (laughs). And now I have a daughter who I get to watch grow up, and a book I get to watch grow up. I’m a very lucky man. 

Skye Stalwart: The Girl Who Fell To Earth #1

 Adapted from Skye Stalwart: The Girl Who Fell To Earth #1

July, 1985

by Dr. Mike Desing

She hung there for a moment, taking it all in.

A mile below, it spread out before her. Her new home. San Helios. Saint of the Sun. Founded by Ferdinando DeDestro in 1772. Home to the San Helios Bridge, the Seven Statues of Martyrs, the three-time world champion San Helios Dragons professional football team, and 2.73 million people.

She knew the numbers. Facts. Statistics. These were the easy things.

The people. She wanted to know the people. She wasn’t going to get to know them from up here. She took a breath and descended.

Immediately, the city shifted on her. The luster of distance became the harsh reality of focus. Before she could even touch down, she could feel it. Listlessness. Pain. Filth. The anger and frustration and resentment and sadness of those who had come to find the sun, but had discovered something much darker instead. Helios shimmered off of the skyscrapers, but he cast long shadows into the alleys.

In one of these alleys, a man was pulling at a woman. Taking something from her. Forcing her to do something. It was not clear. None of this was clear.

Skye was hovering now, in the alley, maybe twenty paces from the man. He had his back to her, and he had pushed the woman against a wall. The woman was crying.

“Stop.”

The man turned around. He reached into his jacket. A pistol.

Skye didn’t like weapons. She especially didn’t like pistols. She wanted to like all people, but she had already decided she did not like this man. “I want to help you, but you have to stop this. Immediately.”

A bullet ricocheted off of her shoulder. It stung a bit, but it was more surprising than painful. She took a moment to process this. Did he just try to shoot me?

Two more bullets ricocheted in succession. More stinging. Less surprise. Anger.

She realized too late that her knuckles had shattered his jaw and his nose. He would be taking all meals through a straw for the next six months, and would probably never be able to activate all 11 muscles he’d need to frown, and definitely not the 12 he’d need to smile. He would be inexpressive the rest of his life.

He was crawling away now. She picked up the pistol he had dropped and bent it in half. Then she folded it in half one more time, just for good measure. She looked about and saw a dumpster. She set the chunk of metal that was once a pistol inside. There was enough garbage in this alley already. Some of it is living. 

She didn’t like that she was thinking that way. She didn’t like the way the darkness of this place felt. It was already piercing her skin in ways the bullet never could.

She reached a hand towards the woman. “I’m Skye Stalwart. Let me help you.”

But the woman shook her head, clutched her belongings, and ran. Skye wanted to follow. She wanted to tell the woman that everything will be well, and that she knew how to help this city heal. She wanted to say that she would make sure things like this didn’t happen anymore. She wanted to help - to tell the woman that a champion had arrived who would solve all of this city’s problems.

But Skye hated to lie, so she said nothing and let the woman run. The man had run, too, leaving a trail of blood in his passage. 

“I already called 9-1-1. They’re sending an ambulance. He’ll be okay. Lots of pain but nothing critical. You need to learn to pull your punches a bit.”

Skye looked up. Perched on a cornice was a man clad in black and canary. He carried a bow.

“You must be the Twilight Archer.” She looked away. She was still thinking of going after the man. She could get him to a hospital in 34 seconds. The ambulance wouldn’t arrive for 7 minutes in this traffic. He could suffocate on blood in that timeframe. There was a 3.2% chance.

“I’m Arik to my friends.” He attached a hook to the wall and rapeled to her side.

“And I assume one of those friends is my father…” She finally looked at his direction on this last word. She had decided that a 96.8% chance of survival was statistically significant enough to trust the odds. 

He smiled, “Yes. Doc Stalwart is a great man and I am lucky to call him a friend. But he has no knowledge that I’m here.”

“Is that so?” Skye knew that her father had a reputation as the smartest man in the world, primarily because he was objectively the smartest man in the world. If he didn’t know Arik was here, he had probably guessed.

Arik might have realized what she was thinking, “or at least, he didn’t send me. I’m here of my own volition.”

Skye waited. She was good at waiting. She’d had lots of practice.

“I keep tabs on things. People. People like you. Like us.”

This was unsettling. If one person, even a well-meaning and genuinely good-hearted person like Arik the Twilight Archer was watching her, who else was? Who else was already plotting against her for reasons she might not even be able to comprehend? She didn’t like this. She attributed it to the darkness of the city. She wanted to feel the sky again. It was her name, after all.

Arik smiled, “I’d like to talk. Do you drink coffee?”

***

She had never tried coffee. Even with the two creamers and two sugars he had suggested, it was bitter. It seemed like everything here was bitter.

“Like it?”

 She shrugged. Again, she didn’t like to lie.

“Look,” Arik had removed his mask and sat down nearby, “I want to help you. Get established.” They were in a small cellar beneath a laundromat. You would never know this was even here if you didn’t know it was here. She realized that Arik must have hundreds of these sorts of safehouses located around the country. Maybe around the world.

Skye blew on her coffee. The heat didn’t bother her - she could withstand temperatures in excess of 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, but a little bit cooler would be more pleasant, “I already explained to my father - I need to do things on my own. I spent nearly two decades - at least, I experienced it as two decades - living in a manufactured reality. I need to experience the real world. I need to figure it out for myself.”

“And I respect that. I do. I’m not trying to get in the way of that. But you aren’t going to be able to learn what you want to learn in a cape. You need to experience what it’s like to be a real human - as a real human.”

Skye sipped the coffee and listened. The taste was growing on her. Maybe two cream and two sugar was too much. Next time she will try it with one of each.

“You need a way to fit in. I have it.”

He handed her a card. It had a picture of her, but her hair was up in a bun, and she was wearing glasses. It said “Student ID” and “Sara Shaw.” She looked up.

“It’s an identity I’ve created for you. You’re enrolled as a freshman at San Helios State. You start next Thursday. You’re undeclared.”

“I don’t like to lie.”

Arik shifted. “It’s not a… okay, it’s a lie. Fine. You said you grew up in an idealized world. I assume that you could make it through a few decades without lying. There was nothing to lie about. Does this world seem like that one at all?”

She shook her head. 

“It’s not a lie. It’s a secret. You’re keeping a secret. Someday, you may not need to keep the secret anymore, and you can tell the world that it was a secret.”

She nodded, but that sure seemed like it was just a nice way of framing a lie.

“You’ve got an apartment on the east side, about ten blocks from the college. It’s safe and clean, but nothing fancy. You want to learn about people? Be around people. Drink coffee. Ride the bus. Join a study group. They have clubs. An engineering club. A chorus. A club that hosts roleplaying games.”

“Why would I want to play a game where I pretend to be someone else?”

“Yeah. I guess that everyday will give you enough of that.”

Something started buzzing in Arik’s pocket. He looked at it. “I need to go.”

“Problem?”

“Hope not. They are transporting Gila the Monster from Kildare Penitentiary to Morgrave Asylum. I’m just going to watch and make sure he makes it there safely. They just left.”

“Want company?”

***

They had perched atop the eastern tower of the San Helios Bridge. The sun had nearly met the water to the west. Below, traffic moved in a steady rhythm. Even here, only a few hundred feet up, Skye could smell the various odors of her new home. They were still alien to her. Uncomfortable. Part of her, most of her, would have preferred to have been up high, among the clouds. Things were cleaner and simpler up there. 

“And there it is…” Arik was looking through binoculars. He handed them to Skye. It took her eyes a moment to adjust, but an armored car came into focus, bracketed by four police cars with their sirens going. Several helicopters trailed overhead. “The helicopters are police?”

“Media. Gila had a high-profile trial. He killed seven people, but managed to get a guilty by reason of insanity verdict. Getting to go to the asylum instead. It’s a big story. Everyone is watching this.” Skye handed back the binoculars.

Was her dad watching? Was he sitting on the other side of a screen right now? She hoped he wasn’t. The image of her father with a remote control in one hand and a beverage in the other had no place in the mental picture she had of him, a picture that had been unfairly influenced by twenty years of dreamstate. Maybe that was why she left. She was afraid he could never live up to the idealized version of him that was the only father she knew. He was a great man, but he was still just a man.

Arik interrupted her thoughts. “Uh oh.”

Skye didn’t need the binoculars. The caravan was within a few hundred yards of the bridge now. One of the three news helicopters was descending. Something had emerged from the bottom. “What’s happening?”

“It’s a magnetic load shifter. That’s not a news copter. Damn.”

Another lie. She was having trouble seeing how lying could ever lead to good. “But a magnetic load shifter on a helicopter that size would never be able to carry away an armored car - it could only get maybe a hundred yards before the kinetic buildup overwhelmed the magnetic–”

Arik had already loosed an arrow, but it pinged off the side of the helicopter. “Armor plating. Double Dang. They’re prepared.”

The calculator in Skye’s mind was running. “Two questions - how deep is the water here, and is Gila able to breathe underwater?”

“Over 300 feet. And yes.”

The magnetic clamp had lifted the armored car maybe ten feet over the road, but it strained against the weight. About 22 tons, Skye presumed, based on its dimensions. It was hard to know from here. That was heavy. She had to move.

She was fast, but wasn’t fast enough. By the time she was within a breath of the helicopter, it had lurched sideways and dragged the armored car a few yards past the side of the bridge. Then the magnetic system failed. Or, it did exactly what it was meant to do, and no more. The armored car splashed into the water.

Decisions. The helicopter would get away if she didn’t take it down now. Arik’s arrows were exploding against the side, but they, whoever they were, were prepared for this eventuality. She could neutralize the helicopter in maybe 15 seconds; the armored car was sinking at a rate in excess of 5 meters per second. It would hit the bottom in no more than 20 seconds. 

She drew a deep breath and splashed into the water.

She was quickly near the armored car - thinking of how to swim beneath it and slow its descent - when something exploded. The shockwave surprised and dazed her. Her mind reeled. They must have attached a charge to the top of the armored car when affixing the magnetic clamp. The armored car lurched sideways and then continued plummeting into darker and darker waters. 

Someone swam out. He was monstrous, resembling a reptile more than a man. He saw her and smiled at her. Then he saluted in her direction and started swimming away.

She could catch him in four seconds. The driver of the armored car already had less than a 30% chance of survival. Every second chipped away at that percentage.

Gila the Monster disappeared into the murky distance, and she turned her attention to the armored car. They were at a depth of maybe 200’ now, and already it would be dangerous to pull the driver out. The pressure at this depth could kill him if he was not already dead. Her only hope was to pull the entire car to the surface.

She was more confident by the moment in her estimate of 22 tons. 

Skye would have paused to take a breath, but she had already taken the only breath she would get for a while, and the explosion had forced part of that out. She wasn’t starting to struggle for air yet, but was starting to feel the discomfort in her lungs.

She got hold of the top of the car and pulled. It pulled harder. She tugged again, feeling the metal strain against her, and then it bent before breaking off. The armored car resumed its descent.

She went back to her original plan, pushing herself deeper and below it, and then trying to lift from the bottom. This immediately met with more success, and she felt that her efforts were slowing its descent. However, slowing its descent and lifting it out were two entirely different problems. At present, she was struggling with what should be the easy part.

She had almost halted its plummeting entirely when something hit her feet. She was on the bottom of the bay. She was now holding the car up, but had 300 feet of water to lift it through. Her air was compressed. Darkness pressed in on her from every side. Every part of this endeavor was running out of time.

It struck her at this moment to ask: what would dad do? Her dad was the greatest hero in the world. He was the man who could do anything. He would know the right thing to do here. But then she smiled. 

Dad would be so screwed right now. He cannot fly.

I can.

So, she started to fly. She didn’t think about the surface. That wasn’t her finish line. No. It was the sky. The clouds. She was flying to the clouds. She just happened to have a 22 ton ruined armored car in her hands as she was doing it.

It was no longer an effort. She realized that Arik had been wrong. She didn’t need to learn to pull her punches. She had pulled her punch. That was the only reason the man in the alley’s entire skull hadn’t been reduced to gelatin.

This wasn’t too much weight for her; Skye was just holding herself back. She stopped doing that now.

Amid hundreds of people who were gathered on the bridge and shore, a collective gasp met her sudden surge from the water. She was a hundred feet up now, hanging in the air, the armored car overhead. She felt the eyes and the cameras and the fingers pointing at her. 

Twilight Archer had cleared a space on the bridge, and she set the car down. A group of citizens ran to the car, pulling out the driver. He was dazed, but was coughing and alive.

Arik went to say something to her, to congratulate her or thank her or commend her, but she couldn’t hear him. The sound of the people and the cameras and the helicopters all straining to get a glimpse of her was too much. It was all too much.

She went to the clouds.

***

After nightfall, she returned to the ground. The darkness had swallowed itself, the night commingling with the other kind, bringing the illusion of peace.

The safehouse beneath the laundromat was vacated. A couch, a table, a mini-fridge with nothing in it, and a letter on the table.

Skye - I’ll be here if you need me. But I believe that you won’t. Don’t be late for class. -Arik

With the letter were her student ID and a pair of glasses. She examined them and put them on. 

Then she started to tie her hair back.