Demiurge

I guess I'm probably not human, but I don't know what that makes me. I'm pretty sure I was human when I was born. I was fourteen when I figured out how to turn into lightning and back again. For a while I couldn't stop doing it. You have no idea what it feels like.

It was years before I realized that I wouldn't be getting any older. I don't know if I fried something or what. Screwed something up, by running myself through white-hot arcing bolts miles into the sky, and back down again. But in any case, I'm fourteen now. And as far as I can tell, I'll be staying that way. It is a little awkward.

My hands are scarred - covered with shiny streaks, overlapping, interlocking in patterns. I'd been playing with the lightning since I was five. That was 9 years before I realized that's what I was made of.

The lightning found me the first time, and I caught it in my hands. It didn't hurt to catch it. Every time I threw it back, it burned. I found I could throw it out even without catching any first. It was inside me. It was part of me - I think it always had been. But when I threw it out from my hands, it burned them. Left hot streaks of flesh that hurt like a bullwhip's lash, and the skin smoked. The jagged streaks healed smooth and shiny, overlapping each other until eventually there was no normal-looking skin left on my hands. It had all been replaced by overlapping scars, that caught the light at different angles. My hands never smoked any more after that, and the heat no longer hurt. I don't know if it's because the scars conduct better, or if I'd just learned the trick of how not to get burned.

Life was pretty hard for me for a while. Years, decades. I enjoyed turning into lightning, which made it a snap to get around if I had any place to go. But people couldn't seem to take to me, and I was never able to hold down much of a job. I didn't understand money or how to get any. I didn't seem to have any useful skills. I couldn't tell people about the lightning. I couldn't explain about my hands - I said it was a chemical burn, or a fire, but it didn't look like that. I thought it looked pretty cool, but most people didn't. I loved how one girl described it: she told me it looked like a tattoo made out of holograms catching the light. But her mouth curled as she said it, her eyes were ugly.

The worst thing was food. I never got much of a chance to eat much of anything. I used to walk past restaurant windows slowly, trying not to look like I was looking in, but I just wished I could be anyone at all on the other side of that glass. The goofy waiter. The bartender. One half of any one of the happy couples - especially that! Especially that. But even the lonely guy at the bar, with his pasta pomodoro and glass of white wine. I wished and walked and tried not to look too obviously. I would try to time it, so that I walked by the front door as someone was coming in or coming out. So I could smell the air from inside. I used to live on those fantastic smells.

One time I was shot in the head. I felt it crack the back of my skull and fly out the front - chipped my eye socket on the way out. It wasn't as if there was pain. There was no time. The shock of it made my body fly to pieces, into lightning, and without even meaning or wanting to I had already instantly flung myself backwards in twenty forking arcs, tracing the bullet-path back and up and into a fourth floor window where this man in black fatigues was looking though a rifle sight one second, and blown into a black cloud of carbonized blood and burning pieces the next. I stood there naked in the room as it caught fire, wondering who this person was, and what he wanted to kill me for. How do you even begin to find out something like that?

That was a few years after I'd discovered that if I concentrated very hard, and let the lightning play out from my hands, I could focus it into an object. The next instant, that object would be real. There was a snap, and a sharp hissing noise when it became real. I practiced making pennies. Mine were real copper! Metals were easiest - iron, gold, lead. The hardest thing was ice, for some reason. Although I've gotten the hang of it since. For some reason, at first, every time I made ice, it caught on fire. It went out quickly, but still it seemed kind of weird that ice would catch on fire at all!

Anyway, after years and years of thinking, I think I've finally decided what I want to do with my life. For the first time, I know what I am here for, and what I was meant to do. It feels amazing to have a dream, and to be able to work hard towards making it come true! I want to open a restaurant. It will be awkward, to look fourteen all the time, but once you've got your papers, they can't say you're not what the papers say. I'm two-thirds of the way through culinary school, and it has been like coming home. The kitchen is where I was born to belong. I'm still hopeless with money, with financial matters - but that's not where my gift is anyway. I'm sure I can get a partner to handle the business side! I want to create a place where people can come to be happy. I want to walk into my own place, and breathe it in, and just live on that.

I was thinking that if I burned my hands with cooking oil, then maybe there would be no other scars.