Hourglass Tales

Fighting crime in tight spandex is not always the best idea. Especially if, like me, you have a body you’re not all that keen on showing off. Yeah, the chain-mail bikinis distract the bad guys (that’s why you see so many super-heroines out there in almost nothing), but at the same time, they can distract you, and that’s not what you want. Are my boobs still in this thing? Is my skirt riding up? Uh! Killer wedgie! Not really my thing. Besides, I don’t have super strength or mind-blowing offensive powers. It’s better if I’m not in the limelight - leave that to Green Lantern. All I have is time.

Yeah. That’s my superpower. I’m Hourglass. Don’t bother asking me how I do it, because I don’t know. All I know is that sometimes I find myself a few hours or minutes or days in the past, often with no idea why except that something in the near future is about to go wrong. And somehow I have to fix it - without supernatural abilities. Just time.

Occasionally I’ve messed up, not fixed things in time and had to go back and do it over again. And I’m never quite sure when that’s gonna happen - I just end up teleported back into the past, sometimes a few minutes, sometimes much longer. Trial and error, baby.

So maybe I’m not a super-heroine after all. Who knows. It’s just sometimes, some of them call on me, or run into me unexpectedly, and all I know to do is work together when the opportunity presents itself, and for some reason it just keeps happening. All I know is that I get stuck in the past until I change what needs to be changed, and damn time loops are a bitch. I never get anything else done.

I go out in street wear, usually a brown leather jacket and hiking boots with cargo pants and a comfortable t-shirt. Nothing you’d look twice at, really. And if you try to find me by that description (though I don’t know why you would), maybe you’ll get lucky, but most of the time you’ll end up at an outdoors shop wondering how the hell you got there and who you were following, anyway.

Since I never really know when it’s gonna happen, I have to be prepared in case it does. The only things that get transported are the things that are on me at the time. Hence the cargo pants. I like lots of pockets. If I carry a purse and set it down in the grocery cart, and I get transported, sure I’ll have the purse when I get back, but as for the time I’m in, I’m stuck without it, unless I happen to know where it is at the time I’m in. But I’m often transported to different places, and I never know when or where it’s gonna be. So I keep a few things on me, in my pockets. Thank the gods for cargo pants.

I carry a smartphone whenever I can. Those things are damn useful even when they don’t have signal. Once I was transported to a time before cell phones existed, but the camera got a lot of mileage, and I took notes on it that turned out to be important later. Voice recorder’s nice, too. And I always keep it charged.

A couple of times I was transported while my phone was charging, and I learned the hard way to always keep a backup. So I just switch them out. The phone function isn’t really the important thing, anyway. It’s not like many people have my number. 2nd line on the same plan doesn’t cost that much, and it’s worth it to know I’ll have it with me.

Once it happened while I was in the bath. I’ll never forget that one. Stark naked, nothing on me but lavender bubble bath, transported a month into the past. Luckily I appeared at the home of my one-time lover and he wasn’t surprised. He just cocked an eyebrow and dug in his closet for an old set of PJ’s I could wear, and things were okay. I’d left an emergency bag there, anyway.

I try not to let it catch me off guard, but sometimes things happen. What am I supposed to do, never bathe again? But I guess I’m kinda lucky, because even though I sometimes get transported to places I’ve never been, I’ve never been sent to a place I didn’t have a friend.

What kinds of things do I do? Well, I don’t diffuse bombs or anything; I don’t have those kind of skills. Let me tell you about the first time it happened to me.

I was sitting on the swing on my grandparents’ back porch just looking at the stars, feeling a bit lonely. I didn’t have many friends back then - still don’t have many real ones - but those I did have I was really close to. I mean really close. Sometimes I fancied I’d fallen in love, but that’s another story for another day. Anyways, I was just sitting there watching one bright star wink out, and suddenly it was daylight.

I’d missed a call from a friend earlier in the day, and hadn’t thought to call him back. In fact, I’d forgotten all about it. I’m close with my friends, but my memory’s not that great. Anyways, all of a sudden my phone began to ring, and I picked it up and it was him. I was astonished by the change in the sky, but it quickly became apparent that my friend was distraught over something and I had to find out what was wrong. When I answered the phone, I said, “Hey, I’ve been meaning to call you. Would you look at that sky?” And there seemed to be a sudden break in his tears. It was only then that I realized he’d been crying.

Well, he was laughing and crying all at the same time, and he just said, “You always say the weirdest things,” and laughed again. So we ended up having a long talk at an amusement park over ice cream cones and cotton candy, and it turned out he’d been contemplating suicide and was going to kill himself that night if he couldn’t talk to someone willing to talk him out of it. I knew he was depressed; the look in his eyes was enough to tell me that. But never in my wildest dreams did I think it was that bad. And maybe, for me, it wouldn’t have been, but I’ve never lived his life and I just knew it was killing him. He told me he felt dead inside, and I believed it. He looked empty.

And suddenly I just knew what had happened. I’d been transported back in time to that afternoon so I could spend the day with him and make his life just a little bit more worthwhile. And he decided not to kill himself after all, because someone cared about him enough to tell him so, and took the time to make a difference. I thought about what I’d been doing that afternoon and realized that I’d been wasting my time. This was far more important to me than anything else I’d been doing, because if my friend had killed himself that night, my world would have been a bleak and dreary place, and I think the rest of the world would have lost something, too. Sometimes you don’t know what you have until it’s gone forever, and I’d almost lost one of my greatest friends.

But one day of fun doesn’t solve depression, especially the kind that runs that deep. That day was just a catalyst for something to change. It was a miracle, sure, in any sense of the word that I got that second chance to save my friend, but if we were going to pull him out of it, it was going to take work.

The internet is a wonderful thing. All it takes is a search with the right keywords to find what you need, if it’s there to be found. I couldn’t buy him instant happiness, but I did find a therapist he could talk to who knew how to deal with the kind of situation he had. With a little work and a lot of support, he was able to get to the point where he’d spontaneously smile, and that was something I hadn’t seen in him in a long time. And, eventually, he found what he was looking for and a life worth having. And I didn’t lose my friend.

Not all my travels are like this, though. This one was both the beginning and intensely personal. Sometimes I think all super powers manifest that way. There has to be something in you that really needs to get out. There was something in me that needed my friend more than it needed time to make sense. There was something I needed that was more important than logic. I needed my friend just as much as he needed me, even though at the time I didn’t know it, and I wasn’t in that kind of pain.

But after that, things had changed. I was more careful about how I spent my time, making sure to treat people the way I would treat them if it was my last chance to see them, and sure, you could say that with my super power I didn’t need to do that, but that isn’t really the point, and never was. You never know when you’ll get a second chance, and you live a better life when you try not to need one.

So, over the years, I’ve adapted. And sometimes it can be the smallest things that can make a difference. Like lending $20 when you know you’ll never see it again, but doing it anyway because it helps someone. Once I didn’t do it the first time and I later wished I had because it would have made a difference for the better. And I wasn’t transported back for that, but when I went further back for another thing I made sure to do that on my way back to the present. And it was worth it. It’s almost always worth it, and so what if you’re out $20 when it means somebody gets to work that day and doesn’t lose his job? Little things like that are almost always worthwhile. So I do them whenever I can.

You may think this is a lame super power, or that it’s not really a super power at all, and that’s fine. But what I do makes a difference, and it’s the difference that counts, even if it’s small.