“I’m sure you get asked this all the time, but for the record –“

“How did I find out?  I’m really sick of that question.  It’s like invading someone’s privacy, you know?”

“Oh, but come on, the public –“

“It’s always about the public isn’t it?  That’s another thing that drives me crazy, always the public.  I just can’t get any good ME time.  I have needs too you know.”

“Oh, that’s good.  Great angle.  Would you care to expand on that?”

“Care to?  I could fill hours of your time with that… but I don’t think that’s really the way to go with this.  In fact, let’s just start over.  Can we do that?”

“If you want, this is all about you after all.”

“Yeah.  Tell you what, I’ll just start, and you can ask me the questions when I’m done.  How’s that?  Is that how it’s normally done?

“Well, not really, but let’s just see how it goes.  I’m grateful you decided to talk to me in the first place, so just go ahead when you’re ready.”

One of the men leans back in his chair and stares up at the ceiling.  Anyone walking by him on the street would definitely do a double take at the outrageous outfit he’s wearing, but then it’s rather familiar, as is the man who’s wearing it.  The man with the tape recorder and notepad waits patiently.  He’s got nowhere else to be, and this story will do wonders for his career, so he knows better than to push too hard on this one.

The man in the crazy getup returns his posture to it’s full upright position, takes a deep breath, and begins to talk.

“Okay, let me just start by saying that I never intended for anything to happen this way.  It doesn’t usually happen this way, and in fact, I never would have imagined it happening this way.  Maybe that’s why it did.  I think maybe I got too secure in my abilities, and in doing that I got sloppy.  I’m sorry for that, and I know it doesn’t change what happened, but I hope that people will be able to forgive me in time.”

“So you’re admitting that it was your fault?”

“I told you to hold the questions until the end.  Do you want this story or not?”

“I’m sorry.  Really.  It just slipped out.  I won’t do it again.”

“Right.  Anyway, I was getting to the beginning….  I was eleven when I first discovered I had what you would call ‘super powers’.  I was racing a friend to the end of the street, and when I got there I turned around, and he was still at the other end of the block, just staring at me.  I didn’t get it.  He’d beaten me before, in fact he was one of the fastest runners in school.  But it was like he hadn’t even started.  I called out to him to ask what was taking so long, and he just stood there with his mouth hanging open.  It was obvious he wasn’t coming, so I ran back.  I was about to ask him if something was wrong, when he reached out and poked me.  Twice.  It’s the kind of thing you do when you think something isn’t real, and you’re having a dream.  Now, I was eleven mind you, and no eleven year old likes being poked, but I’d had a good upbringing.  So I warned him not to poke me again.  And of course being an eleven year old, or more probably that daze he was in though that didn’t occur to me at the time, he poked me again.  Well, I reached out and pushed him.

“You often hear people use the term ‘he didn’t know his own strength’, well it was rather appropriate in this case, and I’m sure you can imagine what happened.  He went sailing back about twenty feet, and landed in an awful position.  And then it was my turn to stand there with my mouth hanging open.

“How had that happened?  I’d hardly touched him.  Sure I’d been a little angry, but I was just a kid.  It took enough work to throw a baseball that far, let alone push my best friend through the air.