Mr. Powers

:: by :: Scott Wilson

An ad on the front page of the Courier Mail stated boldly in a full-page

feature, 'Want to be a super hero? Come try out for the latest reality TV show -

My Hero.' Splashed across the bottom half of the page were a variety of costumed

characters arrayed in all the colors of the rainbow and all manner of zany

outfits. According to the ad, the auditions would be held on the weekend at the

distribution warehouse of Dark Idol comics between eight in the morning until

five that evening. Founding editor and storywriter, Jack Idol, would be judging

the auditions himself.

“Take a look at this,” Chris said to the group of nerds hanging out at his flat.

“A full page, color ad. That must have cost a fortune.”

“Guy must think he's Stan Lee, throwing that sort of money around.” Ivan, Chris'

friend with an unnaturally large red afro said in a nasally voice.

Charlie and Shaun paused the Star Wars Jedi Knight game they were playing, and

looked with childlike excitement at the ad Chris had discovered.

“We should enter,” Shaun said.

“Yeh,” replied Charlie. “Use the characters we created in Champions.”

Ivan pulled out his superhero role-play game book and took his well-worn

character sheet from the page. He held it up beside his head, looked at it then

looked at his three friends.

“I look just like Transistor,” he said mockingly. “Don't I?”

The rough sketch on the piece of paper held the image of a muscle-bound

superhero wearing a tight, bright blue, spandex costume with a silver T across

the chest. The three friends burst out laughing at the ridiculous comparison

between the hero on paper and their wiry framed friend with thick, black rimmed

glasses. The absurdity of even thinking they could dress up like their heroes

caused immense amusement to the four friends.

“What have we got to lose?” Shaun said. “The auditions are on next Saturday, so

we won't miss work. Don't have to tell anyone we are going.”

“Yeh,” said Ivan. “It'll be a blast. Dressing up as our characters will be super

fun.”

Charlie threw a Spiderman figurine at Ivan, hitting him on the forehead.

“What did you do that for?”

“To bring you back to your senses. Where are we going to get costumes in three

days?”

Chris opened his laptop and Goggled costume hire in Brisbane. He sifted through

a dozen or so possibilities, excluding those that specialised in B&D outfits,

until he narrowed it down to four that looked half descent.

“I'll give them a call, see what we can get sorted out,” Chris said, picking up

the cordless on his desk.

By the third phone call, Chris tracked down a shop that could supply four

different superhero type outfits that could have symbols, letters or emblems

Velcro'd on in a range of styles and positions.

"We're set for costumes," Chris said to the group/gang, "let's get ready for the

audition!"

****

First thing Saturday morning, the four friends drove along Ipswich Road, through

the industrial precinct until reaching the desolate grey warehouse where the

auditions would be held. The four friends dressed in their super hero costumes,

under their normal clothes. Outside the warehouse, a large crowd of costumed men,

women and children gathered already.

“I thought we'd be here before the majority of other contestants,” Chris said.

“It's cool,” Ivan said reassuringly. “I'm sure we will be just dandy. The amount

of time we've played these characters in Champion will give us an edge over the

others.”

After two hours, the four friends finally reached the entrance to the warehouse.

Seated at a shiny, stainless steel table were Patricia Shields and Justin Smoke,

two assistant editors for Dark Idol comics.

“Name and powers,” Patricia asked Ivan, who was first in line.

“Transistor,” said Ivan. “I have the power over radio waves.”

Charlie was next in line.

“Speedball. I have superhuman speed and can run so fast I barely touch the

ground. Water is not a problem, as I can run so fast my weight does not make me

sink.”

“Next,” Justin said.

Chris stood forward and flexed his biceps, or lack thereof.

“Iron Law,” he said. “My superhuman strength is the result of an accident in a

foundry. Now, my skin is as tough as iron and my strength, that of a dozen men.”

Shaun was the last of the four to enter the warehouse.

“Fire Fly. I have the power to fly and shoot fireballs from my eyes.”

“Together, we form the HAAS; Heroic Alliance of All Stars,” Shaun added.

“Oh,” replied Patricia. “A super group. We have not seen one of those today.

Jack will be very excited.”

“Follow me,” said a gorgeous, red head in a tight latex bodysuit.

She lead them further into the warehouse, through a maze of passageways and

corridors, all constructed in the same shiny, stainless steel that the desk

outside was made of. Pale blue fluorescent lights hummed softly in behind the

opaque diffusers in the ceiling.

“How much further?” Ivan asked their host.

“The secret lair is at the heart of the building. It won't take us much longer

to reach it, gentlemen.”

“She's sure in character,” Charlie said to his friends.

“Where are the other contestants?” Ivan said, looking around the corridor.

“Each contestant has been allocated a host to evaluate their character. Once the

ten are chosen, you will regroup in the arena for the final stage of the

audition.”

They followed their host to a small auditorium, where she instructed each of

them to sit in a stainless steel chair, which looked more like a modern electric

chair than anything of comfort.

“I think I might stand,” Ivan said to the host.

“I'm sorry. You must take a seat for the interview process. They look

uncomfortable but you will understand why shortly.”

Ivan reluctantly sat down, joining his three friends on the cold, hard seats in

front of the host. She stood on a small platform in front of them and asked them

personal questions individually. After almost an hour Ivan, Chris, Charlie, Shaun

and Ivan felt like they had been interrogated by ASIO. The host left them in the

room by themselves.

“What did you reckon about that foxy mink in that tight red number?” Chris said.

“Pretty hot,” said Ivan. “I hope all of the staff on this show are going to look

like that.”

“She could have interviewed me for hours,” Charlie said. “I mean, the way she

moved was so suggestive and erotic.”

The host re-entered the auditorium.

"We will now proceed to the next stage of the competition." The host clicked a

button on what looked to be a DVD remote control. Thick, steel restraints shot

out of the arms and legs of the solid chairs, locking the four friends into

place.

“Hey, what's this all about?” Shaun yelled.

The chairs began to vibrate, and then lift an inch of the floor, before turning

around to face a doorway opening in the wall to the left.

“Let me out of here!” Ivan yelled.

The host walked down and ran her hand across Ivan's arm.

“You've been selected as part of the final ten contestants. Now, you will get to

meet the great Jack Idol.”

The chairs slowly moved on a track in the floor that none of the group had

noticed previously. With the strange and futuristic stainless steel decor

throughout the complex, anything could have any number of alternate functions. A

doorway hidden in an intricate design in the wall opened and the chairs moved

slowly through in single file into a dimly lit passage. The momentum picked up

until the chairs moved at a nice even pace of twenty kilometres an hour.

“We've got to get out of here.” Charlie yelled over his should to Chris, who was

in the set behind him.

Chris struggle and wiggled in the shackles but they did not budge.

“Look, we must almost be there.” Shaun shouted, seeing a white light

approximately the same size as the door they left the auditorium through.

The chairs flowed out of the tunnel into an even larger auditorium, capable of

seating over one hundred people if packed in. There were six other solid

stainless steel chairs situated around the outside of the lower level. Sitting on

each seat were other superhero fans, dressed up as their own hero.

“Ah, the last of my super team.” Jack Idol said in a jovial voice that echoed in

the large, empty room.

“You have all passed the auditions and will participate in my quest to create

real superheroes.”

“I think you can unlock these now,” Chris said, rattling the shackles on his

wrists.

"Oh, I think we might need to keep them on for a little bit longer, Iron Law. I

will now proceed to transform you into your proper personas."

The wall behind Jack slowly revolved, revealing a laboratory with many

instruments of pain and experimental devices ready for the final stage of the

Aliens

:: by :: Clif Henning

Whistling workers

:: by :: AJ Kaufmann

Careless whistling of construction worker's

blues

sweat bricks

odours of fly meat

seared by hotter equatorial explosions

black jeans burn

white cap stutters

TNT evolves

eyes closed still seeing the radiant

sea of sunclouds

witnessing own resurrections

deaths of whole cultures

at the white guy's realm dream borders

why are my ears and noses around

to witness

all lack of luck and luck of lack-all

happy to be blinded and deafened

by my white guy's

categorizing

lunacy

why erect them spacy glass works hotels

figments of Aztec legend

chaotic processions

of summer

ripped out hearts

gold torture

if not for the pleasures

of failure

will leave this jungle hell lodge

misused as heaven

treated like portraits of sunsnow

in dim light lakes

so the careless whistling continues

not aware

of its consequences

ten thousand years from now

A GUILTY PLANET IN REPOSE

:: by :: John Grey

I lie with my head in your lap

as the earth lies with its head in the lap

of the night

and elsewhere there is a brightness

you can't see

like the guilty grin that would have

come over my face

had I another face on the side

looking away from you

and of course there is ray confession

an orbit of a kind,

words circling the worst of what you can make of them

looking for a way in

to cling to you to make sound seem like peace

I am holding my restlessness in like the earth does

I am spinning through your flesh

even as I keep my bones so still

expecting you to digest what I am saying to you

like the day does heat and light

eventually you just say be quiet be still

but you cannot make it sound like

be victorious

outside the hours move on as if there

is a destination somewhere

that isn't always when they are

A Minimum Threshold of Coolness

:: by :: Robert Ciesla

There's something about fluorescent lights that I had forgotten long ago. It's

not the schizophrenia-inducing short-wave ultraviolet or the constant low buzzing

that's designed to comatose kids into submission. It's the property to display

the full atomic spectrum of the basketball-toting guy who was spoon-fed with

confidence since day one only to take a dump on kids like us. It's the smirk of

an asshole. It's time to re-unite with the class of '98. Only this time I have my

mentor with me.

Avoiding eye-contact we sit down beneath the potently fluorescing phosphor with

the rest of them; we walk as one. My pupils still belong to a highschool play

version of Barnes in Platoon: take the pain motherfucker! It's those insomniac's

4 am astral claymores that make you limp like me. Throw in a few non-productive

panic attacks and all the websites you browsed like the other kids exchanged STDs

by the Amazon river and you'll know exactly what I went through.

Let's take a moment to assume the tear-jerking position. In it there's no room

for social relativism.

During the somewhat lamented socializing the two of us stand back and visualize

robberies in Bali, threats by a mob of passing militants, hep C, and lots and

lots of wasted stock market options. Let's long for all the things you and I

managed to draft-dodge because we stayed home and took the pain of being who we

really are. This inner odyssey of unsung heroics, one you can' t buy from a cheap

airliner to some troubled continent as your once-rebellious bandmates turn into

these hate-filled insurance men with the same hunger in them before their

conquests began. Their parents still deal in law, international politics, BMWs,

and now they share the same foreign bungalows.

What about the breeders? The salt of the Earth, Mars, and Distant Cluster Z.

Without these guys there wouldn't be class reunions, let alone a mankind. It is

through their zygotes that we celebrate our continuing existence. Their

primordial urges and terminal normalcy set them apart from you and I. It is this

grave lack of enthusiasm and karma, this care-free abandon to baby-shit on all

forms of the extraordinary and treat regions beyond their A to B with some

unfounded arrogance.

You start to flicker and we both fade in-out-in.

The mercury vapor suddenly discharges its flow of electrons. The following

crackle confounds them, but to us it is a repose. We are immersed in a purifying

confusion as all visible light dissipates during a speech by one of the

former-hipster-turned-lawyer who just seconds ago displayed an inherited baldness

pattern. This should've been the energy policy around here. The only equation

for the elimination of school massacres worldwide is "no neon gas equals no

typecasting - keep 'em in the dark!"

A majestic life will decorate one's trophy cabinet not just with blowjobs from

fashion designer babes, but with fiery sorrows as well. For each Adolf Hitler

-treatment from an art school and for each hand-me-down from bi-sexual women,

dark side kids get something the alpha mutts will never achieve: synaptic

impulses of utter and complete failure, a touch of the void within. Darth Vader

moments without which one can't even fathom to cross that elusive threshold.

It's in this darkness that you fully emerge, bright as a class M star. My lonely

guy -pill took me to you, and you were right. My seventeen-year old self with the

big Marshall amp. You're the only one who changed and change is the only

constant in the universe. Those who embrace it are welcome wherever they are. The

others never left this place and they're falling to pieces over a little

photon-loss. They had to learn what you already knew.

Now that I've found you, I am unstoppable. Seriously broke and bordering on

saccharine, maybe, but still pushing the fucking envelope. As for you, we'll be

friends to the world. It's back to the amps once more.

Cue Bon Jovi.

winter. night.

:: by :: j. a. tyler

winter. night. and my son was crying yesterday or just now because of an earache

or his cutting of a new tooth or a stomachache. the flu maybe. and he is crying.

even now. jimmy or mikey or bradley. crying even now. and i am listening like a

good father should. i am listening. but it isn't my son crying. not then or even

now. not now. not because of an earache or the cutting of new teeth or a stomach

bug. the flu even. not that. because it is the wind instead. it is the wind in

this that i hear raging and scarring the outside of this building. right through

the wall i hear its vengeance. i hear its cutting its own new teeth. it is not

them. it is the wind. the wind is back. i don't know what is going on.

i've been waiting for the wind like everyone has been waiting for the wind

because when they tore down the cities and towns and imploded them brick by

wooden plank in on themselves or in great hordes of fire we all stood and watched

or watched on television and worried that the windless heated plains would be

the last bit. we all worried equally those of us still alive and still on the

streets of the cities or the towns that were remaining and still had television

access. because in the end no one had access. in the end was the time that i was

born and died. the time i died. that was the end. the time i wrote those words:

winter. night.

but it is not jimmy or mikey or bradley crying now. it is the wind. the wind has

returned to us. to us locked in this building. and to them. the monsters in the

gray suits and the dark masks and the boy faces that are plastic and crying for

their mothers behind hollow cheeks and hollow eyes and the loaded pockets of

slinging weight. it is the wind and not one of my boys crying because of a new

tooth or an ear infection or the flu bug. it is the wind. crying like one of my

boys. crying like jimmy or mikey or bradley for not knowing where i am or what is

happening to me. it is the wind. howling like my wife who tastes of strawberries

and smells like lilacs and is crying like wind for me cutting her own new teeth

and blinding her ears and cramping at the waist for want of me. for lack of me.

for loss of me.

i used to write. i used to be a writer. magazines. newspapers. first. then it was

longer things. things people liked. and someone bound them and printed them and

sold them and gave me some of the money. and so we bought a house and settled in.

comfortable. and i wrote and she cooked and we all held hands and looked into

each other's eyes and breathed good long breaths. and i was born. and i died. we

were eating dinner or what was left of one. because in our minds we were at a

long table filled with turkey legs and celery crunching dressing and we were

wearing our nice clothes and black ties and holding hands underneath the table

and praying with thanks for the goodness that was in our lives. but really beyond

that gray suit and that dark mask we were wearing burlap sacks for clothes and

eating leftovers from garbage cans or boxes of government issue handed out only

to keep a few surviving and we were burning dead bodies in the fireplace to keep

warm in a place that was always always always.

and that's when they came. when we were eating dinner like that. and they broke

the door and cut the makeshift insulation and took me. to this place. a place

that no one should or could or would ever know. right in front of my wife. right

in front of my boys. jimmy and mikey and bradley. right in front of them. and i

died. like that. because i was born and i was still writing even in the midst of

the windless plains and the burlap sacks and the leftover garbage scraps and the

burning dead bodies firing away in the fireplace. even then i wrote this because

i had to: winter. night.