MemeCortex

(This is my attempt at knocking something out for My Super First Day.)

As usual, I awoke to the strains of Uncertain Smile by The The. I’d programmed it into my alarm clock to give me an almost pathologically positive start to the day. Who the hell wouldn’t feel uplifted and ready to go sign on the dole with Matt Johnson singing:

Peeling the skin back from my eyes, I felt suprised
that the time on the clock was the time I usually retired
to the place where I cleared my head of you;
but just for today, i think I’ll lie here and dream of you.

Funny, it always seems more positive when it’s coming out of my crackly electronic alarm. But now I’ve written it down, it sounds a little… bleak! Still, whatever gets you dressed in the morning eh? Today was fresh jeans day: you can’t imagine how exciting that makes the day for me. Fresh jeans and yesterday’s shirt. Because I wouldn’t want people to think I’d gone totally ostentatious.

I turn the kettle on and lay there thinking about whether or not I should have toast or porridge. Porridge is good and I may go to the pub later, so it’s best to have a full stomach. Right about then, I realise that I’ve put the kettle on but haven’t even left the bed.  I pull the quilt up a little and rest my chin on the edge of it, listening to the slow bubbling of water. Was that me? I think it may have been me.

The kettle pops and dies in a slow mashup of steam and metal switch sounds. I’ve suddenly gone off the idea of a coffee so I slip straight into my fresh jeans and grab my dole card. Sitting on the settee to lace my shoes, I eye the kettle on the kitchen sideboard across from me. It says nothing. I suddenly feel as though it has betrayed me and I’m surprised when I look up from the final loop to see it still sitting there. If it isn’t there when I return, I’ll know it’s industry, betraying me, just like my teacher said it would. Then we’ll all know that he was right and not just a loony Marxist, as my Dad used to say he was.

Claiming unemployment goes according to plan. I pretend I’m looking for a job and they write something down. When they ask about any skills development training, I feel I should mention the kettle switching thing but decide to hold back for now. Don’t want to start a riot for those sort of skills. Not ’till I’ve worked out how to monetize the bastard out of it. Leaving ten minutes later, I nod hello to a couple of other regulars and flip my fone out of my pocket.

“Mum? Hi are you busy?”

“I have to feed the cat at eleven o’clock. What do you want?”

I ask if I can come around and promise I’ll only take a few minutes of her time. Mum loves the cat but every now and then I wonder… nah doesn’t matter. I arrive at her place within the hour and go straight in. She’s holding Mitzi in her lap and stroking with a long, determined gesture across his back. I sit opposite her and notice my jeans aren’t as well ironed as I thought.

A minute passes.

“Mum, I was wondering if..” she stops me with a pale, bony hand in the air, gesturing me to silence. We listen for something that only she seems capable of hearing and then lets me continue.

“Mum, has anyone in the family ever shown signs of…” I pause because special powers doesn’t seem the right word. A bit too important for a family like mine. Perhaps ‘loaned ability’ would be the right phrase? I blunder through and tell her about the kettle and a couple of other kettle related incidents that suddenly come to mind.

“Your great great Uncle Ebeneezer had the ability to boil water in a kettle through the power of thought as well,” she says. I open my mouth and repeat his name. She stops me halfway through. “I know, before the days of electric. Just coal. So how did he do it? Nobody knows.”

I’m actually wondering why the hell we’ve got a relative called Ebeneezer, but I soldier on. “I’m not the first?”

She tells me all about how Uncle Ebeneezer first discovered his super power and how he enjoyed years of fame and made a small fortune touring the royal houses of Europe. She tells me about his affairs with countesses and how he enjoyed the finest wines and food available at the time. Then she explains that after the novelty wore off, the upper classes turned against him, as they do with any novelty.

“Of course,” she says, flipping the cat’s tail back and forth across her chin, “some say it was also because he’d slept with half of the daughters of the countesses and created a certain amount of… jealousy amongst the not-so-pretty royals. But your father says nobody objects to a bit of that sort of thing amongst the upper classes, so who knows?”

It turns out that old Ebeneezer ended up in poverty and swinging from the front gates of some Swiss castle, in retaliation for an unwanted pregnancy and an unpaid water bill. Mum warns me about revealing my powers to all and sundry, for fear of falling foul of the same courtly distractions. She is right of course. Though god knows I could do with the money, and it’s been years since I had a good..”

“You must never, ever reveal your super power no matter how tempting. Understand?”

I nod in silence and run a hand across the crease in my jeans that disappears as I straighten my leg.

“Excellent. Now be a good lad and put the kettle on will you, I’m bloody dying of thirst here.”