Do you know why? Because relative to my point of view, I’m running at about twenty miles per hour. That’s fast for a human, but slow for a cross-country vehicle. It means that when I go from coast to coast, I’m spending two months doing nothing but running. I don’t get tired. I don’t get hungry. I’m not aging any faster than normally, relative to objective time… though the first few years of using my powers, that was always something I worried about.

But I do get bored.

Two months of seeing the country unfold a bit at a time, with nothing but your own thoughts. No sounds. Not even the wind in your hair. The interphase field that moves molecules around to keep me from destroying myself or everything else in my wake prevents that.

I’ve always been a solitary person. I don’t mind having some time to myself. I’ll take a hundred mile run sometimes just to get some hours to spend clearing my head or thinking through a project. Trying to make a living and be a superhero, it’s nice to be able to steal some moments out of thin air here and there to do the brain work. After all, I can push up the speed a little when I’m sitting in front of a computer, but only so much.

So short trips are fine. Longer ones are for emergencies only. If I were going to run across the country for fun, I’d have to stop every few hundred miles and spend some time moving around in real time just so I didn’t go crazy.

Still, you asked me what the worst thing about my powers are, and honestly, as bad as that can get, that’s not it. The absolute worst thing is when I get there too late. I can all but stop time, but I can’t make it go backwards.

Bullets travel thousands of feet in a second. That’s nothing compared to me, but it’s fast enough. They’re faster than the speed of sound. If I hear a gunshot, the bullet has already hit its target before the sound hits my ear.

Imagine arriving at the scene of a shooting that’s already in progress. Someone’s just been shot. Now imagine you’re seeing it slow motion. No sound. Just visuals, slower and sharper and realer than anything you’ve ever seen in the movies.

A moment not quite frozen in time, not quite suspended in front of you… and you could step out of that moment, you could speed it up, but there are still bullets flying and people in their paths and you can’t let go and step back into the normal flow of time until you’ve saved everybody else.

Do you have any idea how small a thing a bullet can be? How hard it is to spot in mid-air even when it’s barely moving? How big an area a burst of gunfire can cover by the time I know about it? Most of those bullets will probably bury themselves in walls or trees or the ground, but not all. Any one that I miss could end or change a life.

You see it like this: there’s a blur and suddenly I’m standing there with everyone’s weapons at my feet and a hand full of lead. What you don’t see is how many times I go back and forth, how meticulously I search the area, how wide a zone around the action I comb, how far I stretch time from my point of view in order to be sure… and when I come back down, it’s never because I am sure. It’s because I’ve given up. Because I’ve realized that I’m making myself crazy.

I can’t stop all the bullets. I can’t be everywhere at once. No one can, of course, but I have a power that lets me feel like I should be able to.

I wouldn’t give it up, of course. Not for anything.

But you asked me what the worst thing about my power is, so I told you. It’s not something I’ve ever told anyone before, but then, that’s not the sort of question most people ask.

It makes me wonder what the downside to yours is.

It was a long night, if it were only a night; but Scrooge had his doubts of this, because the Christmas Holidays appeared to be condensed into the space of time they passed together. It was strange, too, that while Scrooge remained unaltered in his outward form, the Ghost grew older, clearly older. Scrooge had observed this change, but never spoke of it, until they left a children’s Twelfth Night party, when, looking at the Spirit as they stood together in an open place, he noticed that its hair was grey.

“Are spirits’ lives so short?” asked Scrooge.

“My life upon this globe, is very brief,” replied the Ghost. “It ends to-night.”

“To-night!” cried Scrooge.

“To-night at midnight.”

“But,” said Scrooge, “if I am to understand you, Spirit, you mean to say that you are born on Christmas Eve and pass from this world in the space of the holidays? Why, but this is fantastic.”

“More fantastic than all that you have witnessed this night?”

“But how is it that you have learned so much about the spirit of humanity in so short a span?”

The Ghost paused for a moment as if it were considering how best to answer.

“Perhaps,” it said at length, “this is not my first life. Perhaps I have had the chance to walk among humanity myself and learn firsthand of the best it has to offer.”

“But, Spirit,” Scrooge said. “Surely you don’t mean to say that a good man died so that you could impart to me your lessons?”

“Oh, no. Men die in every season, man, the good and great as along with the dismal and poor. Was the man I was a good man? Let us say that he did good things sometimes, and that he learned to make the season brighter for those who loved him, and when he was called away—rather suddenly—he was given one more opportunity to do some good before leaving this world for the last time.”

“And this happens every year?”

“I imagine it must,” the Spirit said. “All that is mortal must pass, Ebenezer, on this day as on any other. But do not look upon it as a dark thing. I do not! It is my chance to bear a candle into the darkness.”

“And you do not regret it?”

“If I regret anything, it must be the kindnesses I did not perform, the loving words I did not speak, the opportunities I missed to be of some benefit to those around me. Do I regret the time and manner of my passing? It was not mine to choose, and I hope that those I’ve left behind do not hold it against me.”

“But could your remaining hours not be spent bringing comfort to those you have left behind?”

“I am the Ghost of Christmas Present,” the Spirit said. “It is my honor to bring comfort and cheer to all who draw together in search of it. I will be with them in the hereafter, but for this time I belong to the world. But hark! The time is drawing near…”

When she got over her shock she moved on, because there was nothing else for her to do. She kept moving on. She learned not to put roots down anywhere, never to get too attached to anyone. She traveled all over this world and visited others, but for her, there could be no place like home.

I’d been pointed his way as part of my quest. I had been told not to expect any information about where I needed to go or what I needed to do, but that I needed to hear what he had to say, all the same.

“I am,” I said.

“Then you need to hear my warning,” he said.

“I’ve heard lots of warnings,” I said.

“About accepting gifts, or refusing gifts, or eating food, or declining it, right? Things like that. This is a different sort of warning,” he said. He paused and then threw back his glass, draining the last of the beer from it. “I met just one fairy in my life. Saved its life, by its own admission. Three wishes it offered me… three wishes. Said it would come back on the new moon to hear and grant the first of them.”

“Did it?”

“I full-on expected it wouldn’t… I worked hard to resign myself to the notion that my one and only encounter with the wondrous was all I would get out of it, and to be happy with that. But as the month wore on and the moon waned, I started to feel a flicker of hope and yearning. You see, my father had died of a bum ticker when he was three years younger than I was, and I had a certain recollection that his father had also died young in a similar fashion… so it had often been in the back of my mind that a similar thing might happen to me.”

“You wished for a good heart?”

“Good health in general,” the old man said. “So of course the blasted thing came back, and it heard my wish… that my heart and liver and other organs and parts should be strong and healthy until the day I die. And no sooner than the words were out of my mouth than it struck me that the quickest route to fulfilling that one would have been to kill me on the spot, but no, the fairy just crossed its arms and said ‘It is done’ and damned if I didn’t feel the difference right away, and double-damned if I haven’t felt it since. So, the fairy told me it would be back in a month for the second wish.”

“What did you wish for?”

“This time I knew it was on the up-and-up, so I started to plan ahead. I had my health, and could expect to live a good long life, barring misadventure… as a fit man, I could look forward to a few more decades more of hard labor followed by a miserly retirement. So I decided what I really wanted was a certain measure of comfort, security, and leisure to live out my life in style. That’s not one wish, of course, but the thing that secures all of that is. I decided to wish for money. A million dollars. That’s a chunk of change with the power to change lives today, but back then… well, it was a sight more than it is now. I could have wished for more, but I didn’t want to abandon my old life. A million dollars could be explained. It seemed like a credible windfall.”

“So what happened?”

“Well, the fairy returned, and heard my wish… which was for a million dollars to come to me in some fashion that was legal and brought no misfortune to anyone else… and it suggested I spend the next afternoon removing a certain stump from my property. Under there was a cache of old coins, worth just over one million dollars even after the tax man took his share. And I went a little wild with it, for a while, though my brother-in-law was a banker and he invested the lion’s share of it for me, and I’ve done quite well by him over the years.”

“So two wishes worked out well,” I said. “What happened with the third?”

“Well, the fairy again said it would be back when the moon was new. And I had health and I had wealth,” the old man said. “So for my third wish I wanted something special, something extraordinary… something that couldn’t have been come by any other way. I didn’t know what I wanted when the fairy left, but as the weeks slipped by I thought back to all the times in my life I’d been thirsty and couldn’t beg up a drop of drink to wet my whistle. I knew my liver was good for the duration, so I decided to make sure that never happened again.”

“You were rich,” I said. “You could have bought beer anytime you wanted. You could have bought a brewery.”

“Right,” he said. “But the same could be said for nearly anything I might have wished for. Besides, I said I wanted something special. So I made up my mind to wish that I had but to snap my fingers and the glass nearest to me would fill itself up with whatever I wanted most to drink, the best quality. I had a good week and a half to fix this wish in my mind, to think on the possibilities… the exotic liquers I could try, the fond remembrances I could relive. I could sample thirty-year scotches and the greatest wine collections the world had ever known. And if ever I met a man who didn’t believe my good health and great fortune were a gift from the fairies, I could strike them dumb just like this.”

The old man gave a loud snap with his fingers. I looked at the glass he’d set on the counter, but it remained empty and inert.

“…what happened?” I asked.

“The little devil never showed up!” the old man said. “That was its trick, you see.”

“It gave you perfect health and more money than you needed?”

“It made me believe,” the old man said. “It made me hope. It made me wish… those first two things, they were things I wanted. They were things I asked for. But they weren’t a wish like this was a wish. I’d never felt a deep-seated yearning for a million dollars, you see. I’d prayed for health, in the off-hand sort of way that you do, but I had never fallen to my knees and begged for it.”

“You still had your money,” I said.

“You don’t understand,” he said. “If it had said two wishes, I would have been satisfied. If it had said two wishes, I would have walked away perfectly happy. I wouldn’t have been disappointed if from the start it said I could have one wish, or it offered its thanks and went on its way. But it promised three wishes, and it spread them out so I had time to get used to the idea, to come round to the way of thinking that this was how things worked.”

“But have you ever in your life since then actually gone thirsty?”

“No,” he said. “Not thirsty, exactly. Not for lack of drink.”

“Thanks for the warning,” I said.

“But you still mean to press on.”

“If I’m offered three wishes, I’ll know what not to do,” I said.

“If you’re counting on two, you’ll get one,” he said. “Or three but something else will go wrong. Or you’ll be offered something else, something that isn’t wishes. You see, the lesson here isn’t how it played out with me. The lesson is about what happens when you trust a fairy.”

“I think I could manage a long, rich life,” I said.

“You think I don’t feel lucky?” the old man said. “I do, if only because I’ve heard from others who’ve had their dealings and come away much worse for it. But no matter how lucky I am and how lucky I feel, I also feel cheated… and I’ll always feel cheated. It’s a bigger thing than you think.”

“I could stand to feel a little cheated if I had your life.”

“That’s what they all say, when they find me,” the old man said. “But they all find me in a bar.”

“I won’t make the same mistake you did,” I said.

“No, you’ll make your own.” The man raised his empty glass. “Here’s hoping you come out the other end of it.”

“It is,” Death said. “But few enough people think to ask, and even fewer exercise that right. Fewer still see the game through to completion. Most give up within a matter of turns.”

“Are you so good?”

“I am as skilled as you might expect of one who has had as much practice as I have, though my skill is not solely the reason for concession.”

“Certainly you’ve had more years to practice than most people,” I said. “But how much of that time did you devote to a serious study of the game?”

“A little here, a little there,” Death said. “It adds up. In particular, I have spent more time than most masters of the game learning to play under the peculiar conditions that govern the game in this between-place.”

“What peculiar conditions?” I asked.

“There must be judges, for an impartial contest,” Death said. “No move may be made if the judges deem it illegal.”

“What is the penalty for attempting an illegal move?” I asked, with more than a touch of trepidation.

“Nothing,” Death said. “It is withdrawn, as if it had never happened, and play continues.”

“Must all the judges agree?” I asked, looking for the trap or hitch.

“No, there are three of them and majority rules,” Death said.

“Who are they?” I asked, expecting it to be either angels or demons… and not knowing which one I’d rather have.

“A council of theologians,” Death said. “We have had other judges, but none remained sufficiently interested long enough.”

“I will probably lose,” I said. “But… I think I’m going to challenge you anyway, and I’m going to have to see the game through until I’m checkmated. That’s what life is, right? Struggling against death until the last moment?”

“Sometimes. There is such a thing as acceptance,” Death said. With the wave of a hand, a chessboard appeared on a pedestal. A trio of figures appeared in the mist that swirled around us, though they kept their distance. “Our judges… they will remain some distance away, unless their judgment is needed. You may have your choice of sides.”

“I’ve heard that white has an advantage in going first,” I said. “That if you’re playing white and you play a perfect game, you can’t be beaten. Do you suppose that’s true?”

“Do you suppose you’ll play a perfect game?” Death asked.

“I concede the point,” I said, but I chose white anyway. There seemed to be a better chance that Death would play perfectly than I would.

The opening moves of the game seemed nothing particularly remarkable to me. It was only when I reached for my knight and moved it out of the back row that the judges came forward.

“False move! False move!” two of them cried.

“That was a perfectly valid move,” the third one said. “But I’m outvoted. As usual.”

“What’s wrong with the move?” I asked.

“You moved your knight one square over and then two squares up,” one of the objectors said.

“Yes?” I said.

“Knights move two squares in one direction and then one square perpendicularly.”

“No they don’t,” the third one said. “They move just as the white player described.”

“It’s the same results either way,” I said. “Fine, though. I’ll move the knight two squares forward and then…”

“Stop!” the other objector said. “That isn’t how the knight moves at all. The knight moves one square diagonally in any direction, and then one square orthogonally in a direction outward from its square of origin.”

“Oh, it does not!” the theologian who hadn’t objected to my original move said.

“‘Orthogonally’, indeed,” the first theologian said.

“But… listen,” I said, having taken a moment to decode the new claim and what it meant in terms of squares on the board. “All three methods you’re describing end up with the same set of squares as valid destinations. You’re all stating the same rule a different way.”

“We most certainly are not!”

“The very idea!”

“It is frankly insulting that you would take the true rule and lump it together with the unfounded suppositions and fallacies peddled by these charlatans!”

“Okay,” I said. “Let me try a different tack. You’re just describing different ways for calculating the valid moves the knight can make, but the knight does not actually cross through any squares. All the actual rules of chess care about is the destination square. So if you can all agree that the destination is valid, can I make the move?”

“You’re suggesting that the path doesn’t matter?”

“The very idea!”

“Your sophistry has no place in a serious game.”

I sighed and looked at Death.

“It is possible to win a game without the use of knights,” Death said. “But I’ve had more practice at it than most. Do you wish to continue?”

I knocked my king on its side.

“Look on the bright side,” Death said. “Before this occupation was arranged for them, they spent all their time arguing about more important destinations than that of a chess piece.”

“What is thy dread bidding, master?” the imp intoned.

“Wretched spawn of the hell-pits, it is my wish that… wait, is that a pirate hat?” the magician said, registering the headgear.

“Er, no,” the imp said as the article in question poofed away in a puff of smoke. “I mean, not really. Just… just some dark glamour. It looked like a pirate hat, though. Good eye.”

“Why were you wearing a pirate hat?”

“Well, it gets boring, living in a bottle,” the imp said. “So I took up a hobby.”

“Playing pirate?”

“Well, not at first,” the imp said. “At first I was just amusing myself by grabbing little crafty things for myself whenever you sent me out into the world, and then I got into model-building, and then from there it just sort of… snowballed.”

“You mean you built a ship inside your bottle?”

“I think it could catch on,” the imp said. “Though I think if you got me a slightly larger bottle, a glass one, then it might be a little more, you know, functional. As a decoration, I mean. Decorative, I guess, would be the word.”

“I didn’t summon you from the hell-pits for decorative purposes.”

“Right, no, you didn’t,” the imp said. “But I’m just thinking… when I’m in the bottle, which is most of the time, you’re not getting any use out of me anyway. But with a glass bottle and maybe some kind of a display stand, maybe a nice polished red walnut or a polished mahogany… well, you’d just be getting more value. And since you gave up your soul to bind me, you might as well get as much as you can out of the deal. Right? I mean, am I right?”

“…let’s just get back to my dread bidding,” the magician said.

“Right,” the imp said. “It was only a suggestion.”

“Well?” she said. “Did you find anything we could use?”

“There was some leather,” he said. “All cut out and laid out for tomorrow’s work.”

“Have you made anything for our shop this day? Any clothing we can sell?”

“No clothes,” he admitted.

“Then what were you doing all hours of the night while the giants slumbered?”

“I… I was making shoes,” he said.

“Oh, well,” his wife said, brightening. “Good shoes?”

“Very fine shoes,” he said. “Of the best leather, and not a stitch out of place.”

“That’s something,” she said. “They should fetch a decent price.”

“I hope so,” he said. “The shoemaker’s family could certainly use it.”

“The shoe… wait, do I understand you to mean that you made shoes for that cobbler and his wife, and nothing for us?”

“It wouldn’t feel right, taking from them when they have so little,” he said.

“And we have less!” she said. “You didn’t even make a hat or a jacket from the scraps?”

“There… there wasn’t time,” he said.

His wife threw up her hands.

“When my older sister’s husband traded their beans away for a lumbering beast full of milk and meat, I told her ‘You won’t catch my Alfred doing that.’ When my younger sister’s husband gave away his two best axes to a man because he ‘had an honest face’, I said ‘My Alfred’s got a better head than that!’ Now what will I tell them?”

“Now, dear… it isn’t as bad as all that,” he said. “The cobbler and his wife are very kind people… I’m sure they’ll do us a good turn if we give them a chance.”

“You can wait for a good turn when our shop is prosperous and our pocketbooks bulging,” she said. “Until that day, you’re going back through the wall every night until you have something to sell!”

“Is there some problem with astrology, sire?” the witch asked.

“The problem is that you are either a fool, or a charlatan who takes me for one,” the king said. “Astrology is a trick of perspective. My own philosophers, learned men all, have explained to me that the stars we see as points of light on a plane are in fact celestial bodies separated by great amount of space, that there is no more relationship between two stars in one of your so-called constellation as any two other random points in the sky.”

“Is this so, sire?”

“It is a fact!” the king said. “Why, my chief philosopher says that if you were to stand at any other point in the cosmos and look skyward, you could gaze upon the same stars and not see a single one of your constellations. The distances from front to back would make them all wrong when viewed from any other angle.”

“This is why I make it a point to make my observations from here,” the witch said.

“Well, you’ll have to find somewhere else,” the king said. “I have decided to give your tower over to the chief philosopher, so that he may better continue his scientific observations of the heavens. I have not yet decided where to put you.”

“I see,” the witch said. “Well, if you will have none of my astrology, my liege, I do have other arts. Augury by observing the flight of birds, for instance. Has that been exploded by philosophy?”

“Not yet,” the king said.

“Then, if your majesty would please indulge me to look out that window for a moment?” the witch said.

“Certainly… good heavens!” the king exclaimed as a vast and shadowy shape like an enormous skull erupted from the distant treetops, visible just outside the windows. It quickly dissolved into a massive flock of cawing birds that swiftly winged away.

“Oh, we’re in luck… that was a big one. Now, then,” the witch said. “Did you mark in what direction the flock departed? The breeze is southerly, but the birds…”

“That was… that was a death’s head,” the king said.

“Points in space, sire,” the witch said. “As I say, the breeze is southerly, which might lead one to…”

“Forget the breeze! Tell me what this grim spectre portends!”

“That? Oh, nothing, clearly,” the witch said. “You see, that was just a trick of perspective. The birds’ positions relative to each other… well, if you had happened to see them from any other angle, they would surely have resembled nothing more than a random mass. As they were.”

“But I saw…”

“Yes, sire, indeed you did,” the witch said. “But consider! A flock that size must have been seen by dozens, scores of people, even people in this very castle. But only from your vantage point at the window would it have been possible to make out the grim spectre of death among the beating wings. It appeared to you and you alone among all who witnessed it. I’m sure your philosophers would be happy to explain how this means it can’t possibly…”

“Hang the philosophers!”

“Well, that’s probably going a bit far,” the witch said. “But if you’re in the mood to discuss their disposition, let us talk about the housing situation.”

The new year rolls over, stretches, sits up, and looks around. It notices with a slight blush the bare limbs of its trees. It notices the layers of ice and snow that the old year had piled on before its departure. It is a look that the old year had the maturity to wear well, but the new year finds it gaudy.

It’s time for a change, the new year thinks, and it begins the slow process of peeling back the blankets of snow, of shaking the sleepy world out of its stupor. Out with the white, in with the green. Hello, everybody!

The old year looks back. It remembers when it was so young and thought everything was flower blossoms and babies. The new year would learn soon enough. It would find out there were more interesting things to be done with leaves, and then it would get bored with them entirely. The old year could try to tell the new one that it would all just end up in the same place, but there was little point. The new year wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t believe. It had to learn for itself.

Time marches forward. It never looks back.

Two soldiers, disregarding the gate not fifteen feet away, quickly cut through the chain-link fence. One peeled back the snipped section while the other slipped through, looked around, and then motioned towards the others waiting by the fence.

“Go, go, go!” the commanding officer barked. “Move it, move it, move it!”

A whole squad of soldiers stormed through the fence. Some of the schoolchildren screamed and fled, but most stood watching in shock as the soldiers took up positions around the cage-like structure of the old jungle gym and began throwing faded blankets of assorted colors over the top of it. A pair of soldiers knelt in front of it, propping up couch cushions that were handed to them by their comrades.

“Come on, I want those bars fortified. I want a sniper on top of that slide,” the commander said. “Get the foursquare courts secured, now!”

One child, hypnotized by the action, lets go of a bright orange foam football, which gets one good bounce on the hard surface of the basketball court them wobbles towards the main body of soldiers.

“Oh shit!” the commander yells. “Grenade!”