Free Untouchable by Scott O'Connor

getting melted.”
    The Kid drew a blast of heat vision shooting from Matthew’s red eye, then a ring of fire burning on the ground around Brian and Razz’s feet. He drew shaded tendrils of gray steam rising from the tops of their heads, big beads of sweat leaping from their brows. Then he went to work on their faces, distorting their eyes and noses, stretching their features, melting their skin in the heat. The more he drew, the more he wanted to draw, the more gruesome detail he wanted to add. He drew blood pouring from their eyes, bile oozing from their mouths. He set their clothes and hair on fire, opened their bellies to spill their guts.
    The Kid stopped, finally, put the pencils down. He and Matthew looked at the drawing. A riot of colors, filling the entire page. They could hardly make out the individual figures in the gory mess. The only character who could be easily identified was the superhero Matthew, standing in the middle of the scene, causing the carnage, cold and heat beams shooting from his eyes.
    “Now draw yourself in there,” Matthew said, breathing hard from the excitement of the scene. “Draw yourself using your power for the last time.”
    The Kid leaned back into the page, drew a tiny gray figure way up in the corner, a red cape fluttering behind.
    “What’s your power?” Matthew said, rocking back and forth. “What do you do?”
    The Kid didn’t answer. He kept drawing, sketching skinny arms reaching out from his sides, skinny legs stretching out behind, the superhero Kid soaring, passing the puffy clouds, leaving the scene, flying away out of the picture.
    Sea green light in the fish fry on Alvarado Street. Darby and Bob sat in their booth by the window, looking out into the dark parking lot. A knot of people stood at the curb waiting for the bus, women in nurse’s scrubs, men with toolboxes and lunch pails, slump-shouldered, the fatigue evident in their bodies.
    Bob was laying waste to a large basket of fish sticks and tater tots. Darby picked at his filet, the greasy roll wrapped in a page of car ads from the morning’s paper. There was a TV on a high shelf behind the counter. Darby could see its reflection in the window, a news report on the survivalist group up north, the same footage from earlier in the day, a long-lens shot of the buildings behind the high fence.
    “He wanted to haggle about the price,” Bob said. “That room was a heavyweight job and he wanted to haggle about the price.” He dunked a fish stick into one of the cups of tartar sauce, tossed it back into his mouth. “I told him that if he wanted to haggle, I had twenty-five biohazard bags full of he-knows-what that I was willing to dump back up in that room, just give me the word.”
    They had dinner on the nights The Kid was over at the Crumps’, usually in the same booth at the same fish fry. Bob was always eager to have a meal away from home. After a couple of marriages and head-case girlfriends, Bob had lived for the past few years with his elderly Aunt Rhoda in her claustrophobic old house in Boyle Heights. He took care of her as best he could, though there was nothing really wrong with her but old age. She never left the living room, the couch in the living room, where she slept, where she watched game shows and the daily Mass for Shut-ins .
    “I don’t mind the cleanups,” Bob said. “The fluids and matter and all of that shit. It’s listening and talking to those people that wears me down.”
    A bus pulled up to the curb. The group at the corner climbed aboard, leaving the stop empty. Darby scratched at his hand, a small scab on the black-script W above the knuckle of his index finger.
    Bob coughed into a napkin, wiped his mouth. “How’s my guy?” he said.
    “I had to pick him up at school again today.”
    “What happened?”
    “Somebody pissed on his clothes.”
    Bob shook his head. “Don’t let them fuck with him, David.”
    “I know.”
    “You think they’re little kids so, so what,