dear josephine

8/9/2019 Dear Josephine

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DEAR JOSEPHINEshort fiction by

Scott C. Martin



Dear Jospehine – 2010 - Written by Scott C. Martin

Released under a Creative Commons Attribution-

NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License. This means you are free

to share this story with whomever you wish, and reproduce the

story for any non-commercial purpose. I really wish you would.

You may also re-write it if you didn’t like it, and distribute the

reproduction for any non-commercial purpose.

Please attribute Scott C. Martin with any redistribution or

remixing. I really do appreciate your time and attention.

The front image “Lightning and its effects - In: Meteorologia

philosophico-politica .... Reinzer, Franz, 1661-1708. Published in

1709. P. 55. Call Number: QC859 .R37 1709” is in the public

domain. The archival photograph was taken by Mr. Sean

Linehan, NOS, NGS. It is available at the National Oceanic and

Atmospheric Administration Photo Library site.

Visit Scott’s website soon for more free stories.

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/


http://www.photolib.noaa.gov/htmls/libr0013.htm


http://www.scmartin.com/









1

Dear Josephine,

This letter is uncomfortable to write. Maybe by the end I'll

have talked myself out of what I intend to do, but I just don't

think so. I could just pop over and see you in Nebraska, but I

think this might be better. Sometimes it helps to work things

out on paper, and you're the only person I really trust. You're

the only person who knows who I really am.

I'm struggling to write in English. I've learned hundreds of

languages, and I'm still surprised that this one went

international. So inefficient.

How's your Mom, by the way? Is she still living with you,

helping out with Lisa and Tim? She was always so nice to

me... and so angry with me for not asking you out! What a

sweet lady. And I'll bet Lisa and Tim are getting big.



SCOTT C. MARTIN

2

I know it's been a year since the funeral and we haven't

been in contact, but I want to tell you again how sorry I amabout your husband. David was a good guy. Seeing a strong

young man waste away like that... heartbreaking.

There are some things I need to tell you that I should have

told you a long time ago. But first, I want to tell you what

happened to me last week, and what brought this all about.

So I'm walking down the street the other day (52nd and

Vine), when I see a full can of paint fall off a tall building

right toward this lady's head. If it makes contact, the woman

is dead. Without even thinking, I vaporize the can with my

heat vision, and I manage to get most of the falling paint as

well. It turns into a light dust. As an extra touch (no charge!

ha ha) I give a hint of focused breath to dissipate the dust.

Nothing touches the lady — or kills the lady — and she walks

on unharmed.

I jog over to the lady (we'll call her Paint Woman) and say,

"are you okay, ma'am?" A little false modesty, I admit. Of



DEAR JOSEPHINE

3

course she's okay. She shoots me a dirty look. She's got

earbuds in, and her iPod is turned up pretty loud.

I say, a little louder this time, "I don't know if you're aware,

but you almost came into a rather bad accident." Rather bad

accident? I'm not sure what's up with my lingo lately.

Anyway, she says nothing, and clearly doesn't recognize

me in my civilian outfit. So I decide to give her a glimpse of

my uniform under my shirt, because maybe she'll think, "hey

it's him! My son has an action figure of him at home, and he

saved me! What a story this will make!"

I barely unlatch the first shirt button when she starts

screaming and hitting me with her bag.

I said, "no, ma'am, you don't understand! I just saved your

life!" Just to be safe, I close my shirt. After last year's

paparazzi incident, I can't afford to be half-undressed in

public anymore. "Caped Hero in Compromising Position."

Ugh.

Some guy shoves my shoulder and says, "Hey, why don't

you leave the lady alone?" This guy is all muscle, no neck.



SCOTT C. MARTIN

4

We'll call him No-Neck. I could send him flying with a poke

of my finger, of course, but he's pretty strong for a regularhuman. And at the moment, he's looking like the good guy.

Not me.

Why did I have to even tell her about the paint can? There

was a time when I would have kept walking.

So while No-Neck is pushing me around, I get all these

fantasies, you know? I imagine what it would be like to zap a

tiny hole in No-Neck's brain with my eyes. I could leave him

merely paralyzed, or on the ground pissing himself, or

without the ability to speak. The world's best neurologists

would never catch it, much less figure out how it was done. I

imagine this guy sitting on the street, shitting himself and

speaking in tongues.

"There's been a misunderstanding, sir," I say in my best

'good citizen' voice, the lady still shrieking.

"Yeah?" he says. "Pervert!" He definitely has me pegged

for some kind of flasher or molester.

It makes me think about the first unarmed person I killed.



DEAR JOSEPHINE

5

About fifteen years ago, I caught some guy alone with a little

girl in an alley. I won't go into specifics, but I secured the

man, and flew the kid to a hospital. I then took the man to the

police. A pretty cut-and-dried evening.

But the man was released the next week due to lack of

evidence. The little girl wouldn't testify. And of course, I

understand that. I mean, come on, what was she? Six or

seven? Traumatized for life. It's not her fault. And even

though I am who I am, an immortal person of no fixed

address isn't really a star witness. When the judge calls

someone to the stand, they prefer that the witness not be able

to fly and live forever.

It was too much for me.

I scooped the guy up off the street, and no one even saw.

Up we went. The air traffic controllers might have seen me

cross the airspace, but that's probably it. They know me. They

wouldn't have thought anything of it.



SCOTT C. MARTIN

6

The guy stopped screaming and punching at about 12,000

feet. He was unconscious at 16,000. He lasted longer than Ithought he would. We were pretty close to space when he

died, the earth between us and the sun. It was quiet, cold, and

uneventful.

I took him about halfway to the moon. The effects of

decompression on a normal human aren't that interesting, and

it didn't satisfy me at all. I placed him back in the atmosphere

above the Indian Ocean.

I knew how long it would take him to start falling again,

but I watched anyway. I watched every damn minute of those

four hours. I enjoyed them. He started to disintegrate, and I

followed him down. I watched his skin crisp like paper. I

watched his body crease at the waist as he fell and burned. I

watched his unrecognizable parts splash into the water.

Who knows how many robberies I could have stopped,

how many drowning kittens I could have saved, how many

murders I could have prevented during those four hours? But



DEAR JOSEPHINE

7

for some reason, I believe killing that man made it possible

for me to carry on for another five years.

The Paint Woman is still shrieking, and her new friend No-

Neck throws a punch. A real haymaker. To keep up my

disguise, I have to take it, which I've come to hate (another of

the many things that never used to bother me). It doesn't hurt,

of course, and I'm pretty good at pretending to take a punch.

This guy is clearly surprised I don't fall down, though.

So I throw a dazed look in and let my knees buckle,

reclining awkwardly on the pavement.

"That'll teach you, you fucking pervert!" he says.

I must not put a hole in this man's brain. I must not put a

hole in this man's brain.

"Police!" yells Paint Woman. By now there is a crowd, and

a couple of cell phones either making calls or taking pictures.

The second time I killed an unarmed human, there was a

crowd, too.



SCOTT C. MARTIN

8

About ten years ago, one particular politician, a member of

the president's cabinet, insisted that we blow up this littlecountry with which the US was having a crisis. We'll call him

Senator Nuke. For him the nuclear option was the only

option. I disagreed, respectfully. That was back when they

used to let me into those meetings.

Senator Nuke had gotten into my face, forehead red and

bulging, and poked my chest with his finger. "You... aren't

one of us!" he said. I told him that I was more like him than

unlike him, that every human belonged to the brotherhood of

man, and that I wanted peace to carry the day. Swear to God,

a couple of people in the room started clapping.

"You'll never be one of us!" he yelled, cutting off further

response. "You'll never understand the stakes of being human,

being mortal! What are we, some kind of pass-time to you?"

I assured him that wasn't the case, and other voices of

reason brought the room back on topic. A diplomatic decision

was reached, and it occurred to me that this guy was always



DEAR JOSEPHINE

9

going to be at these meetings. He was never going to get his

way as long as cooler minds were present.

It also occurred to me that he might be right. Maybe I

never really was going to get it. What was it to die? Even the

clever attempts of my most hardened adversaries hadn't been

successful in killing me. I would never die at the hands of a

human. Maybe I am just passing time.

I was thinking about this as I watched him at a rally some

months later, where he was working a crowd into a frenzy.

"Now is the time to move against our enemies!" said Senator

Nuke at the rally.

The crowd went nuts. I watched from a safe distance. No

one knew I was in the arena. I'm known for hanging out in a

different metropolitan area.

"Your voices join together and shake the halls of justice!

They shake the activist forces! And when we deal with our

enemies, all options will be on the table!" The crowd was

eating it up.



SCOTT C. MARTIN

10

I thought about him having access to more than the

president's ear. I thought about his finger on the button. Ithought about him in the oval office, forehead red and

bulging in the middle of a crisis-filled night, meeting with his

own cabinet. No cooler minds in the room.

Enraged, I burst the man's appendix with a focused,

imperceivable shock wave.

He collapsed at the lectern, and died horribly and painfully.

I sat on the moon for weeks, surprised to find that I had

become an assassin.

(I should apologize to Iceland, by the way, about the dam

break. You know the one. That happened when I was on the

moon, and I totally could have fixed that.)

And then, instead of forgiving myself, I came to terms with

it. I am an assassin. I've broken the code. Things can't go

back to the way they used to be.

A crowd gathers around me and No-Neck and Paint Woman,

and I can hear the voices of the cops a couple of blocks away.



DEAR JOSEPHINE

11

Officers George and Alan. They won't recognize me in my

civvies, but they're reasonable guys. I'm sure they'll telleveryone to just move along.

No-Neck decides that hitting me wasn't enough, and puts a

boot in my face. I have to go on my back. I'm getting

annoyed. It's times like this that it would help to conjure

some nose blood or something, because my nose should have

shattered like a plate. People notice when you don't bruise or

bleed. I remember when I walked out of a battle in the

Peloponessian wars unscathed, when everyone else in my

unit was killed. That was hard to explain, and led to a bunch

of promotions. Anyway, that's another story.

So policemen George and Alan get there, and they do their

whole "what's going on here" thing, and put their bodies

between me and No-Neck and Paint Woman. Everybody's

yelling. Bystanders are pointing and showing the police cell

phone pictures of what just happened. Alan, at least, gets a

firmer hold on No-Neck, presumably after seeing video of the

boot kick to my head on someone's cell phone.



SCOTT C. MARTIN

12

Nobody's asking me what happened. I'm still reclining on

the concrete, in a defensive pose. I just need enough people tolook away, and I'll be gone.

I'm talking in circles around what I really want to say to you.

I've done a lot of bad things, but I've been able to abide by

my code: kill only when necessary, and never the innocent.

Fight for the side I believe in. Disappear when things get too

heavy. Let the mortals sort out my origin and death stories.

There are lots of stories about how I got my abilities and,

more interestingly, how I have died. I've apparently been

killed by an arrow to the heel, entombed alive by my

apprentice in a magic cave... all kinds of made-up stuff.

People can't deal with it when you just up and leave. There

always has to be a story.

I've found it helpful to have an advisor, someone with

whom I can confide my secret. And that's been you, this time

around. Your generation prefers to see me in a cape and tight

pants for some reason. Hell, I don't care. More comfortable



DEAR JOSEPHINE

13

than a tunic, I guess, or a suit of armor. As long as I get to do

some good. Only you, though, know who I am without thecape.

Doing good used to be enough. It isn't so much anymore. I

think I'm starting to lose my grasp of what "good" really is.

I try not to get too emotionally involved with a mortal

advisor, and never romantically. So, regardless of what your

mother may think, I avoided dating you not because I wasn't

interested in you. I've seen countless lovers, wives, and

mistresses to their deathbeds, and many more I've had to

leave behind in order to protect.

You were different. If you were my lover, I knew I could

never leave you, regardless of how bad my situation became.

You would almost certainly be in constant danger by your

association with me. So, I made you my advisor. Close

enough to confide in, distant enough to be safe. I thought that

would help. It really hasn't.



SCOTT C. MARTIN

14

After a while, police officer George kneels down to talk to

me, and asks me if I'm okay. I tell him I'm fine, and that thisis all a misunderstanding.

"I believe that, pal," he says. "Look, you wanna press

charges on this guy?" George gestures over his shoulder at

No-Neck, who is against a wall talking with officer Alan.

"Because I think both the lady and the man who kicked you

are ready to walk away from this if you are. You don't look

too much worse for wear."

You have no idea.

"Yeah, I'd just like to move on, if that's okay," I say.

Officer George smiles, and says "sure, kid." I can only

imagine his relief at having to file less paperwork.

I look up, and Paint Woman is glaring at me. So is No-

Neck. They don't even know me, and I can feel the hatred

radiating out of their eyes. And it gets me to thinking.

It always ends badly with you people.

If I help you, you're happy for a moment, and grateful. But

then you want me to go away.



DEAR JOSEPHINE

15

If I don't help you, you're cursing the heavens and

wondering why I failed.

Innocence? A temporary state. The pure of heart? Not for

long, usually.

And even the rare grateful, gracious person only lives for a

blink of an eye, then they're gone and I'm left with the

assholes again.

I'm left with Paint Woman, whose life I spared by saving

her from an accident. I'm left with No-Neck, whose life I

spared by keeping my temper. And both of them are wishing

me dead.

But I've changed, too. I'm not okay getting by without an

acknowledgement. I need recognition. I need validation. For

the first time, I need to be needed, and it's not working well

for anybody.

My code is broken.

This all has to stop.

I think of all the ways I could bring the world to an end.

Some of them are pretty painless, actually. I could cleave the



SCOTT C. MARTIN

16

planet in two with a shock wave. The concussion would kill

nearly everyone instantly. I could hurl the moon into the sea.It would all be over in a few minutes.

Then I think of you, and the debt I owe you.

I killed your husband. I consider him the third unarmed

person I killed.

I didn't do it directly. I didn't create the liver cancer, or

cause it to grow faster. But I could have stopped it.

I saw it growing as I peered at him, seething with jealousy

and hating myself for it, at your wedding. I saw under his

skin. I could have mentioned it then. It was quite treatable.

Heck, I might have even been able to do it myself.

But I didn't.

He got sick after the birth of your second child, and like a

jealous child myself, I didn't say anything. By then it was too

late to do anything about it. Even for me.

I am so sorry.



DEAR JOSEPHINE

17

This world, as I've gotten to know it over the last few

thousand years, hasn't really changed. I probably won't

destroy it. I may just let a stray asteroid take care of it.

(There's one coming as it is. If I do nothing at all, your kind

only has 374 years left anyway.)

I haven't talked myself out of it. Not yet. But I will wait.

And I will disappear.

It won't take long for people to notice I've gone. Some

terrible thing will happen, and they'll shake their fists, and

they'll forsake my name. For their purposes, I will be gone.

But not for yours.

I hope you don't think it too creepy, but I'll be around, and

you will never see me. No harm will come to you or your

family. Don't ask for me to appear, because I won't.

But I will be around, repaying my debt as best I can. Please

have a happy life. Give my love to Lisa and Tim. Tell them

not to worry about anything.

Your friend,



SCOTT C. MARTIN

18

Gerald

P.S.

Timmy will probably be experiencing a tooth abscess in

about a week. From what I understand, they're pretty painful,

so a preemptive dentist visit might be a good idea.

dear josephine

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