All My Friends Are Superheroes by Andrew Kaufman

She has thirteen minutes before the plane lands. She needs to talk to the Clock. Putting her tray in the upright position, she settles back in her chair, closes her eyes and falls asleep.
    The Perfectionist’s eyeballs flicker behind her eyelids. Even though she and the Clock both live in Toronto, and it’s not even a ten-dollar cab ride between their houses, they never manage to find the time to get together. So, at least twice a month, the Clock visits the Perfectionist in her dreams.
    They sit in matching yellow mesh lawn chairs. The strapping pinches the Perfectionist’s left thigh. She shifts inher chair, looks over her shoulder and sees the cottage her family rented every summer until she was eighteen. She wiggles dry sand between her toes. It’s 3:30 in the afternoon. She hopes she’s wearing sunscreen and sniffs the air.
    ‘Can you smell that?’ the Perfectionist asks the Clock.
    ‘Smell what?’
    ‘Tom.’
    ‘Only if Tom smells like dead fish,’ answers the Clock.
    ‘I swear I can smell Tom,’ she says, folding her hands in her lap. She looks at her fingers. Her nails are never bitten here.
    ‘What’s it like?’ she asks the Clock.
    ‘What’s what like?’
    ‘Travelling. Being able to travel to the future.’
    ‘It’s nothing like you think,’ the Clock tells her.
    ‘Will you take me?’
    ‘You wouldn’t like it.’
    ‘I just want to see it.’
    ‘It’s not like you’re imagining.’
    ‘Take me there,’ the Perfectionist pleads. She puts her hand on the Clock’s arm. ‘I really need to see it.’
    Part of the reason the Perfectionist is so desperate to see the future is that she once got stuck in the present. She had a fling with Terry Cloth, whose superpower is the ability to make every day feel like Sunday. They met on February 11th and spent the next five months in bed. They didn’t have a lot of sex; they moved the TV into the bedroom. They orderedin and had supplies delivered. They started screening their calls and then stopped answering the phone altogether. June went by and neither of them had left the apartment.
    Then one morning, the Perfectionist woke up early. She let Terry Cloth sleep. Puttering around in the bathroom, she stepped on the scale and waited for the needle to stop swinging back and forth. When it did she was so shocked she jumped off the scale, spilling red wine on her white housecoat.
    She’d gained fifteen pounds. All her clothes were too tight and her housecoat was the only article of clothing she felt comfortable in. The washing machine was broken. She pulled on a pair of Terry’s track pants and a white T-shirt that stretched over her belly. She carried her housecoat down two flights of stairs to the street.
    Outside she sniffed in the fresh air. The sound of traffic was overwhelming. There were so many people. She walked to the laundromat watching the sidewalk.
    The wash cycle was twenty-seven minutes long. The Perfectionist read a newspaper, had a coffee and eaves-dropped on people talking about their jobs. She looked at her watch; it didn’t feel like Sunday any more. It felt like Wednesday. It was Wednesday.
    The Perfectionist knew Wednesdays weren’t as good as Sundays. But it still felt good to have one. She never went back to Terry Cloth.
    Terry Cloth was heartbroken. His superpower so often went unrecognized and he thought he’d found someonewho really appreciated him. His life became an endless series of Sunday afternoons, instead of Sunday mornings, until he hooked up with Mr. Breakfast.
    The Clock pushes her sunglasses on top of her head. ‘You want to go because of Tom?’ she asks.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Then what I’m about to show you will only disappoint you,’ the Clock says.
    ‘I think I know that.’
    ‘Okay.’
    The Clock picks up her lawn chair. She sets it down so her back is to the water. The meshing sags as the Clock sits face-to-face with the Perfectionist. Their knees touch. She holds the Perfectionist’s chin. She tips the