In the years just barely exceeding my youth, I was one of the most obstinate and regretful people I have ever witnessed. A key component in my stubbornness was the fact that I had a half-baked sense of self-awareness. While aware of my infirmity, I resolved myself by blaming my sister. She was the easiest to fault for my horrible internal disfigurement; not only did I naturally gravitate toward any shortcut, but I felt an actual need to fear any true obstacles.

As per my routine, I was lamenting over this personal backwardness to my friend, Maria in an alleyway one morning. Like all alleyways in Chicago, it was far from the safest location to have any sort of vulnerable discussion, let alone any discussion at all. Maria Bello who had a beautiful name and an even more beautiful presence was an Oracle, but her real power lay in her advice-giving and freely given thoughts. Some people thought she talked too much but I never tired of hearing her voice which, to me was reminiscent of the oboe.

Like all musicians, her eyes were focused, and she had cheeks that bloomed like blueberry muffins when she smiled. Her nose was slightly crooked from a break years before the age that she was (nineteen) but her expression had harmony despite its imperfect human features. In my eyes, she was the most beautiful person to exist from the way that she laughed, to the way that she would hook one eyebrow upwards sarcastically to the way that she existed, perfectly. She didn’t attend any sort of university despite being nineteen only because she was exceptionally indebted to her family who lacked the means for greater expectations for her. She therefore allowed herself to withdraw from her scholarly desire and went to work with someone like me as a store clerk. I was also nineteen and without much higher education, not because it was out of my family’s economic reach, but because in my foolishness, I had squandered my options into oblivion. I was rejected from every school I applied to, but while I needed something to snap me out of being such a sheep, I was thrown into a new avenue that I had never expected my life to turn on. It gave me a strong impression that disillusioned my childhood dream that I was equal among my peers and humanity as a whole. It was the most perplexing feeling that I hadn’t anticipated, encountering my greatest fear, the exemplar of rejection.

The avenue on which I turned was a post-summer morning when my friends said their goodbyes, promising to remember who I was. Then, because I had observed the worst thing that had happened to me (at that age), I bemoaned to Maria about my failures in my daily morning rant. I knew that each day when walking to work, she would listen obligingly, but she would wonder when the day would come when I discussed something else. She would offer to me her thoughts, but I never prattled to listen to anyone but myself and the whistling between my ears.

On some random day when I was only at the part of my tedious tirade where I mentioned that everyone hated me–not because I was disagreeable but because I had no gift– something struck me in the back of my head. I felt my body crash into the rocky concrete before I was witness to the throbbing pain in my skull. Maria exclaimed loudly, clashing with the assailants and leaving me to tend to myself. The ringing in my ears and the distracting blood running down my cheek made the flurry of yells unintelligible. I looked behind me to see Maria grappling with the blurs that resembled two other people who were certainly not holding their own. A few feet in front of me was the red brick that had been the projectile that hit me. In the back of my mind, I panicked at the thought that I could’ve been dead if it was thrown a little bit harder or landed a few inches in a different place, but something else took precedence in my thoughts. A needle stuck to the back of my throat as I watched people on the sidewalk. Horrified because I was within view of the sidewalk I timorously hugged my back against the wall to sink in the shade. Pedestrians didn’t notice anyway. I barely considered the brick anymore as I tried to shield the sight of blood from the outside to no avail.

Maria returned to my side moments after with a scrape on her cheek and bruised knuckles that would look worse the next morning. I grimaced at the sight of her blood unaware of the amount of my own that had fallen onto the collar of my shirt, staining it red. Her eyes loomed over my head, thinking of who she should call, a doctor or someone more powerful. I saw the fixation in her eyes, but they weren’t at me (they were never at me) and I saw her mind flipping through scenarios like notecards.

“I’m going to call your sister,” Maria said, pulling out her phone. I shook my head no, feeling my neck cramp and feeling the same pain down the back of my spine. She sent me a glance that had a terrible expression but she didn’t say anything, dialing Nathalie’s number. I grabbed Maria by her wrist which she disliked, lurching out of my grasp. My voice felt coarse and I tasted the iron in the back of my throat which made it sandy.

“Don’t call her, I’ll survive,” I said.

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“Praise Ahzel,” she murmured to herself, casting a glance to the sky and crossing her middle and index fingers, “you infuriate me. Do you realize what they just did?”

“It’s just a scrape.”

“Scrape? They hit you with a brick because they heard you talking about being a human.” Her eyes were opened starkly with a straight boldness in their nature.

“I’ll survive without your pity.” Maria sighed at me and I looked down.

“You have to stop watching so many shows, those lines are getting pretty corny,” she smiled sullenly. I smiled with a grimace of blood pooling in my mouth which she made a face at even though she was not typically repulsed by blood.

Discomforted by my weak appearance, I stood with a certain determination but struggled to stand against the force of blood rushing up. She held me by the arm, laboring under my weight as I stumbled to regain balance. She waited until my hand held the weight of my body against the building wall when she began to make a call. My subconscious urged me to stop her but I was too transfixed by the little red brick in the middle of the alleyway for my body to listen to my mind.

The brick itself was no larger than a few inches and its age had withered its corners down to curves. At the same time, I grappled with the blood that continued to stain my skin. On my hand, my blood took on the same rust color as the brick itself.

Suddenly at my feet, a string of purple light began to circle itself creating intricate patterns on the ground. It dug sparks into the concrete and cast a glow onto my downturned face. I looked towards Maria, who was still on the phone. She acknowledged me with a regretful look but continued to converse with whoever was on the other of the call.

“It’s better than calling the Lobby. Then you’d get some other superhero who could be worse than her,” she said away from the phone. I turned back around to see a figure of pure eloquence. Her feet were hovering off the ground and her cape was serenely draped over her shoulders within a silky silhouette. The rune on the ground had stopped glowing but her eyes were still the same vibrant purple. She had long black hair and intricate patterns on her chest plate which had a slivery ornamental appearance. Her hands were stretched outwards horizontally in a display of magnitude and her wrists were adorned in gold bangles that were bejeweled with presumed to have other magical properties.

“I dealt with the thugs already,” she said.

“Thanks.” I looked towards Maria but she had her back turned.

“I am here to heal you.”

“Thanks.”

She hung in the air awkwardly without breaking the linear expression she wore. Her eyes were so brilliantly lit that the rusty brown walls were almost as purple as her cape. I looked down when I saw that the brick wasn’t even there because the rune had made it disappear.

I was silent and unobtrusive before her, and I wasn’t even able to tell if I was crouching down because of the pain in my head or lowering myself in front of her physically as if to bow to an elder. Even with her great power, she didn’t know how to go about helping me because she sensed my lack of gratitude, so the two of us resolved to sit in silence until the other broke.

“I’m going to heal you now,” Nathalie repeated with some hesitation in her voice. I held out my wrist for her to cast the spell that I was familiar with. Several times in my life, she’d traced the same rune over my veins and in the scars on my hands. She would whisper nonsensical sounds under her breath as I pretended not to be infatuated with magic.

Her feet were still in the air because she preferred it that way. After all, she would never admit to her shortness. With the rhythmic lines down my hand, I began to feel a sense of immediate relief as every ounce of pain subsided, but since she seemed too engaged in her healing, I allowed my shoulders to droop in alleviation.

When Maria was done talking on the phone, she told me that she had prevented me from getting fired that day, giving me a smile paired with a pat on the back.

“Don’t touch him, it’s too delicate. Healing magic is–challenging,” Nathalie snapped cooly. Maria stepped away from me, holding her hands up as if to surrender to a crime, casually glaring at my sister.

When Nathalie finished healing me, she left in the same rune she’d appeared from.

Before her departure, she told me “Go home.”

Maria went to work, giving me one last look that told me to rethink my impression of the whole event.

“Don’t read into it, they don’t know you like how I do,” she said. “and even though it’s me, there’s no shame in that either.” Her smile was pretty and I smiled back, subtly dismissing her. I never expected that it would take the magnitude of total calamity to convince me to, for once, consider her words and to understand that my shame never existed beyond the confines of illusion.