Super Born: Seduction of Being by kkornell

happy as I can, but in a town like this, believe me,
there is not enough of me to go around. I’m a goddamn public
utility for these poor, women. So you do the fucking leg work, it’s
Two-For-Tuesday at Skelly’s bar tonight and I’m up to my ass in
research!”
    There was a crashing sound and a
female voice from the other room. Jones glanced at the bedroom door
and then turned nervously back to me. “Well, research calls, my
friend…just checking to see if that’s her, you see.”
    “ And how’s that going for ya? Was
she born January eighteenth?” I joked.
    “ No, no, no, my friend, I don’t
believe so. But if you will excuse me,” said Jones seeming
embarrassed and made edgy by my discovery of the ‘research’ he was
doing in his bedroom. He turned away and then turned back to me.
“You will be needing some funding by now, I am guessing.” He opened
a drawer, pulled out a stack of bills with a wrapper that
read $5,000, and
tossed it to me.
    I caught it and felt its comforting
crunch in my hand. Just what the doctor
ordered , I thought, trying to contain
the smile I felt inside.
    Then it hit me. All these strong, beautiful women want him? What am I, chopped
bologna?
    “ You can let yourself out.” Jones
walked toward the bedroom mumbling, “Research, lots of
research.”
    Again, I beat feet. It was beginning to become
a habit.
    * * *
    The next day, I halfheartedly began
work on the assignment Jones had given me. After all, there was
nothing for me to do until she surfaced again, so I might as well keep busy with
this. As it ended up, the information was mostly online, so
assembling the list of births was easy. Of the nine thousand and
some births that year in Scranton, only thirty-two were on January
18. Surprisingly, thirty-one of them were female, and twenty-seven
of them were born during the Super Bowl. Those percentages defied
all statistical logic; there should have been one or two more boys
than girls born, and they should have been more spread out
throughout the day. It all struck me as stange.
    Where the work became difficult was following
what happened to these thirty-one women after that. With name
changes from marriage, divorce, remarriage, death, movement around
the country, unlisted phones, and phones in others’ names, it
became hard to follow, and I often lost the trail. With only pizza
and beer as my assistants, I continued diligently all day and into
the night (not really, but you get the idea).
    Little did I know that while I toiled that
night over a hot laptop, events were already in motion elsewhere in
Scranton.

When I reached Jones’s place, I soon found out
why he hadn’t been concerned about my meeting with Lowe. He was a
wreck, obviously not having cleaned up or changed his clothes in
days.
    As I joined him at his desk, Jones
quickly folded up some blueprints and circuitry drawings, slipped
them in his desk. Chapter 4
    Miracle of Flight 118 (My
Ass)
    When I first saw the jet climbing up
to join me in the sky, it felt like a friend come to join my fun in
the frigid night air. I closed in, thinking that maybe we could
race into the clouds together. It was pretty to watch, with its
flashing lights, but too slow to keep up with me. I stopped and watched it pass.
As I watched its lights drift away in the night, I could sense the
one hundred hearts beating inside and it made me feel connected to
them.
As I later learned from watching the news reports, at the very
instant I watched it glide by, there was trouble in the left engine
of the two-engine jet, when dozens of turbine blades approached two
thousand degrees after eighty-seven seconds of full throttle
flight. One shattered from the strain and a dom ino effect broke blade after blade, until the engine
exploded, sending thousands of daggers of
two thousand-degree alloy through the engine cowling and into the
wing and fuselage, cutting through flight controls and electrical
circuits, shredding the tail. With the sudden drop of