dogs at Coney Town, okay?”
Mollified, yet feeling slightly bummed that he had not yet encountered the sweet spot he was searching for at Jason’s behest, Arp agreed to the offer.
Seated at a table with their food, Arp and Jason ate and surveyed the passing scene.
In the middle of the food court, employees were setting up an inflatable bounce house for the enjoyment of the kiddies. The muted roar of the fan designed to keep the structure erect and bouncy suddenly sounded, as the blower underwent a test activation. Then the fan was shut off and disconnected from the flattened bounce house for examination of its workings.
And that was when Arp saw the desired sweet spot, pure and potent and invisible to anyone but him.
He only had time briefly to advise Jason – “Watch!” – before the moment demanded his action.
Arp threw his half-eaten hotdog at a nearby trashcan, deliberately undershooting so that the food waste landed on the floor.
One of the ever-circulating food court cleaning staff, armed with broom and dustpan, saw the defiantly messy gesture and spun around indignantly to confront and chastise Arp.
The handle of the guy’s horizontally held, lance-like, fast-moving broom caught a geezer right in his stomach, causing him to oof and stumble against his geezer wife. The woman lurched forward, catapulting her many bursting bags of purchases directly under the feet of one particular passerby.
This important passerby, a brown-clad UPS delivery fellow, was pushing his heavily laden flatbed at top speed across the polished floor. He tripped over the strewn consumer goods and went down, releasing his grip on his cart, altering its vector and even imparting a slightly greater impetus to it.
The cart barrelled toward the kneeling bounce house worker inspecting the fan. He activated the blower just as the cart took him out and glancingly hit the fan.
The roaring untethered fan swivelled around on its wheels and caught a new group in its blast.
Entering the food court at that exact moment, the heretofore-unseen shoppers who became the target of the rogue blower consisted of a pack of insouciant and attitudinous Bad Girls. These adolescent Snooki-lookalikes wore crop tops emblazoned with legends such as FUTURE MILF and GUESS WHERE I’M PIERCED. They also sported incredibly abbreviated skirts over bare legs.
Whomped by the blast from the high-powered fan, the shrieking girls felt their fluttering minuscule skirts being blown skyward. They fought at first to tug down their garments, but then a pedestal table bearing a highly breakable sugar shaker crashed into the path of the whirlwind, and their eyes were filled with flying sucrose, forcing them to abandon decorum. Now their various styles of risqué undergarments, barely concealing a catalogue of tramp stamps, were on shameful display.
As various Good Samaritans and mall employees raced to the aid of the Bad Girls, Jason turned to Arp with awe suffusing his face.
Arp said coolly, “You asked me to provide…?”
“Girls in their underwear standing around in the mall. Sweet bleeding Jesus!”
The next several days after the stirringly and reassuringly confirmational mall incident, Arp faced nearly continuous uncertainty about how to proceed with his new powers. The aching dilemma occupied his mind almost every minute. A pure case of ‘new superhero’ angst. The whole “With great power…” thing.
Should he proceed selfishly, as unconflicted Jason counselled, employing his gifts solely for personal satisfaction?
Or should he embark on a course of selfless altruism, seeking to right a worldful of wrongs?
Didn’t he have an obligation to function as a counteragent to all the entropic fuckups accidentally sowing pain and disorder everywhere? Walking through airport security the wrong way and immobilizing thousands? Tapping into oil pipelines and causing massive conflagrations? Speeding down a freeway and racking up scores of crashed vehicles?
But
Mollified, yet feeling slightly bummed that he had not yet encountered the sweet spot he was searching for at Jason’s behest, Arp agreed to the offer.
Seated at a table with their food, Arp and Jason ate and surveyed the passing scene.
In the middle of the food court, employees were setting up an inflatable bounce house for the enjoyment of the kiddies. The muted roar of the fan designed to keep the structure erect and bouncy suddenly sounded, as the blower underwent a test activation. Then the fan was shut off and disconnected from the flattened bounce house for examination of its workings.
And that was when Arp saw the desired sweet spot, pure and potent and invisible to anyone but him.
He only had time briefly to advise Jason – “Watch!” – before the moment demanded his action.
Arp threw his half-eaten hotdog at a nearby trashcan, deliberately undershooting so that the food waste landed on the floor.
One of the ever-circulating food court cleaning staff, armed with broom and dustpan, saw the defiantly messy gesture and spun around indignantly to confront and chastise Arp.
The handle of the guy’s horizontally held, lance-like, fast-moving broom caught a geezer right in his stomach, causing him to oof and stumble against his geezer wife. The woman lurched forward, catapulting her many bursting bags of purchases directly under the feet of one particular passerby.
This important passerby, a brown-clad UPS delivery fellow, was pushing his heavily laden flatbed at top speed across the polished floor. He tripped over the strewn consumer goods and went down, releasing his grip on his cart, altering its vector and even imparting a slightly greater impetus to it.
The cart barrelled toward the kneeling bounce house worker inspecting the fan. He activated the blower just as the cart took him out and glancingly hit the fan.
The roaring untethered fan swivelled around on its wheels and caught a new group in its blast.
Entering the food court at that exact moment, the heretofore-unseen shoppers who became the target of the rogue blower consisted of a pack of insouciant and attitudinous Bad Girls. These adolescent Snooki-lookalikes wore crop tops emblazoned with legends such as FUTURE MILF and GUESS WHERE I’M PIERCED. They also sported incredibly abbreviated skirts over bare legs.
Whomped by the blast from the high-powered fan, the shrieking girls felt their fluttering minuscule skirts being blown skyward. They fought at first to tug down their garments, but then a pedestal table bearing a highly breakable sugar shaker crashed into the path of the whirlwind, and their eyes were filled with flying sucrose, forcing them to abandon decorum. Now their various styles of risqué undergarments, barely concealing a catalogue of tramp stamps, were on shameful display.
As various Good Samaritans and mall employees raced to the aid of the Bad Girls, Jason turned to Arp with awe suffusing his face.
Arp said coolly, “You asked me to provide…?”
“Girls in their underwear standing around in the mall. Sweet bleeding Jesus!”
The next several days after the stirringly and reassuringly confirmational mall incident, Arp faced nearly continuous uncertainty about how to proceed with his new powers. The aching dilemma occupied his mind almost every minute. A pure case of ‘new superhero’ angst. The whole “With great power…” thing.
Should he proceed selfishly, as unconflicted Jason counselled, employing his gifts solely for personal satisfaction?
Or should he embark on a course of selfless altruism, seeking to right a worldful of wrongs?
Didn’t he have an obligation to function as a counteragent to all the entropic fuckups accidentally sowing pain and disorder everywhere? Walking through airport security the wrong way and immobilizing thousands? Tapping into oil pipelines and causing massive conflagrations? Speeding down a freeway and racking up scores of crashed vehicles?
But
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