A TALE

Much to his surprise, Superman felt tired. He felt like someone had slipped kryptonite into his orange juice. That is, if he had allowed himself a drink of orange juice. Or a bite of food, or anything in the past several years.

Superman was tired because he had not stopped moving for eight years. He hadn’t stopped to eat, sleep, drink or speak. There had been small respites here and there. A moment stolen to literally catch his breath.

He had once forgotten to breathe for nearly a month. On one occasion, he realized more than a year had passed since he’d emptied his bladder.

He hadn’t taken the time to use the heat rays from his eyes and a mirror to shave his beard, one whisker at a time, at superspeed, or trim his hair. Superman’s beard and hair had grown long, though a bit of the curly-cue lock of hair still fell across his forehead.

Superman hadn’t spoke to Lois in nearly eight years. He had seen her. Just because he’d abandoned being Clark Kent didn’t mean that Lois still didn’t get in trouble. He’d saved her as she fell from a building. He’d pulled her from a car trapped underwater. He’d absorbed the brunt of an explosion to protect her. He’d even caught her before she could hit the floor once when the heel of her black pumps snapped.

He saved her, but he couldn’t spare a moment to visit with her. By the time she’d catch her breathe to say, “Wait,” he’d often be hundreds of miles away, saving someone else. Lois’ “Wait” echoed in the super-hearing of his ears.

He was still her Superman, but he was also the world’s Superman. He had become the world’s non-stop Superman.

For eight years, Superman had moved from place to place, city to city, nation to nation, criss-crossing the globe all of the time, non-stop, saving lives and preventing catastrophes.

He had placed himself between 2 million gunmen, stopping 2 million bullets from killing 2 million people in crimes around the world. He prevented thousands of traffic accidents each day. He diverted hurricanes, calmed earthquakes, swallowed tornadoes, doused forest fires, dammed floods.

He thwarted terrorists and serial killers and emotionally damaged people bent on killing sprees. He performed CPR in a milli-second. Abusers broke their hands on his flesh rather than damaging the flesh of their wives and children. He caught construction workers falling from scaffolds. He could perform the Heimlich maneuver on a choking person with a puff of superbreath. Superman saved individuals and cities, communities and nations, all within the same day, every day, all the time. He did not need sleep. He did not need food. He did not need to stop.

He’s Superman! The non-stop Superman!

Yet, fatigue had finally caught up to his superspeed. No matter what he did, violence and catastrophe never ended. He had prevented or rescued almost every person in the whole, wide world for the past several years, but he still missed someone. Even with superspeed, he was sometimes too slow to stop the bullet, lift the family car out of the path of an 18-wheeler, shore up a mud slide.

Even by giving his all, he still couldn’t do it all. Not even a non-stop Superman.

It started nearly eight years ago. He’d been off-planet battling Brainiac when the first jet hit. He’d had barely made it to the moon when the second plane hit that September morning in New York. He burned through Earth’s atmosphere as a third plane hit Washington, and a fourth plane fell from the sky over Pennsylvania.