I have discovered that I am invisible.

I think about this in the middle of a crowd. It comes into my head, a gray and blue thought, and I hesitate and stretch my forefinger out before me. I wrinkle the skin on the side of my hand and I brace my knuckles, white and red. My bones leap out of their skin and I close my eyes, so the sun is a big silver-white flattened circle on my eyelids, and inside of it, I can see spots of black and orange.

I think about once, in the fifth grade, when I heard my first curse word: shit, uttered from a mouth with fork prongs for teeth. I think about the girls in middle school who called each other whore and then made best-friend necklaces. I think about PE and my best friend, who poked herself in the eye until tears came, and she would sit in the locker room and cry and wouldn't let anyone touch her. I think about boys on the playground chasing girls on the blacktop and I think about the two boys who ran behind the trees in the field and would avoid each other's eyes. I think about my first time at church and staring at the collection plate, and I could feel the dollars and dimes in my pocket, but I passed the stand with a set mouth and shuffled hands. I think about how tired the world must be and I think about the day I decided I wanted to major in psychology.

Someone shoves into my back. I could feel his fist in the curve of my spine and I sputter, shifting to the left and hitting my shoulder hard against the wall. My eyes wrench open.  I should get used to it, I suppose; everyone will touch, ram into you, shove their hands inside the mess of cartilage and bones and sockets and purples that your back must be, when they can't see you. It's the defense of the blind and the anxious and the young and the lonely, and maybe the invisible, too.

I had stopped there, in the middle of the crowd, a realization welling up in my throat and threatening to spill out of all my pores; the heat was suddenly thick around my face, and bodies began to twist around mine, forming separate shields and bubbles and butterflies of air, drifting away on wings of silver and gold; and I wondered if they could tell, if they knew something was there, something.

I begin to walk home and the city loses its color, emptying into negative space and black shavings. I bite my lip and decide to stop thinking.

=

I have this theory—

Life has been made into a lot of things, metaphorically. Highways, roller coasters, long roads, pathways in forests, untouched wildernesses and city streets, small homes and large garages, empty plates and half-full glasses, an anorexic's lung and a schizophrenic's eyes, a baby's stomach and an elderly thigh; and maybe for a second it was your head, your hand, your home, your lashes.

But the way I figure, life is a basket of fake fruit, and we stare at the white polish until we think maybe they could be real.

And some people leave their baskets on their front porch and stare listlessly at the number of pears they have, yelling, "Gosh darn it, I just have all these darned pears!" to a sky that does not respond, only blinks blue and columns of white. But the pear-lovers huddle against their terry-cloth baskets and touch the sugar bruises on their apples and whisper, "Oh, I wish I had all those pears," and when they begin to cry, their eyes well up into purple and black spots on the surface of their extended foreheads.

And somewhere in the middle of the street a person watches on and wonders if they like strawberries, if they would be willing to take them off his hands, red and green at the tips. And manic-depressant girls suck on their blueberries, hiding them by their teeth, but don't let themselves bite down, an explosion of blue dew and spit inside their mouths. And meanwhile sociopathic boys touch their pomegranates to their foreheads and can't bear to remember their previous life, the almonds they once held in silky hands.

But really we're just fake fruit with thin skin in a giant basket God likes to carry around on Sundays when He is resting and hungry, and sometimes we can't bear to admit it, and sometimes there's so much going on that we stop and whisper His name, following a trail of "wow"s.

And so we lean back: "Wow, God, wow," and "God, who?"—and at nighttime we close our mouths and send silent prayers with our eyes, and we wake up with lemons in our hands.

The way I see it, anyway. Philosophical garbage.

=

When I get home, I decide to wait for my message from God.

I mean, He has to have something to say. I have been given the power of invisibility—I have been cursed with the affliction of transparency. I press my forehead against the cool kitchen tile. "Come on," I mutter, my teeth hitting hard against the ceramic. "Say something."

I wait around. I chew on almonds; I wipe the salt from the skin of my arm and I trace butterfly patterns on my wooden table, but I fail to finish them completely, instead sitting up and walking away, my eyes cast downwards. I play with the sitcoms on the television and I make three grocery lists. I take a shower and once inside I sit on the floor and go over the list of personality disorders in my head, like I used to, fifteen-years-old, shaggy-brained and determined: "Cluster A—paranoid personality disorder; schizoid personality disorder; schizotypal personality disorder—"

He does not speak. Not even the crinkly, cracking opening of his jaw can be heard; not the barest whisper on the white skin on my foot; not an utterance or echo inside my mind. Nothing.

I try to think. How do people normally hear from God?

A pause. They don't.

I squeeze my hair inside a towel and stand up. Okay. New strategy.

For a man (Man?) who won't even show us His left pinkie toe, He likes to do a lot of talking and rule-making. I pull on my earlobe while I sit at the dinner table, lounge on the couch, rummage through my refrigerator, trying to make my ear long enough to fit. I imagine His big pink lips puckering near the lids of my soft cartilage. I imagine my spat-on flesh as He hacks words into a gullet of pink darkness. I imagine opening my eyes, slowly, staring at Him, watching God whisper into my ear like a ridden lover or an envious flirt or a circling hawk—take your pick.

I hesitate after I turn off the television, cutting the frail celebrity bodies in half and dousing them in warped blackness. I bet Spider-Man talked to God, I think to myself. He always seemed a little crazier than Batman or Superman.

I think some more, letting the thoughts roll around in my head on steady wheels. And I bet God has gray eyes. Is it racist that I think He's Caucasian? Would God choose a racist as His superhero? I bet Spider-Man was racist. He looks the type—well-off, white. Young.

I hug my lids together, squeezing tightly, and I name the top half Romeo and the bottom half, Juliet. They strain to come together and I blur the decisive line between them, until nothing matters, eyelash pressed against dried-leaf eyelash and an ocean of black to dissolve them in. I pull on my ear and all I can hear is poetry, Shakespearean woes, ephemeral vows.

The clock hums mournfully, counting off hours and minutes on invisible toes. I hold my breath. I watch the colors in my head until God is a red blur against tile, and I am the darkness tucked on the inside of my eyelids, and you have to really focus to see me, behind all the greens and blues playing ring-around-the-rosies.

I chew on my finger until the taste of skin seeps into my gums, and I decide that I could really go for a donut.

=

I wake up in the morning and know my sleep was unfulfilling. I had a dream that my eighth grade English teacher had come back to grade a bunch of papers I had never finished. I knew where I was keeping them, and I knew where I had cut off, the essays that ended at lonely ands and the thesis statements that began with This is what I believe—. I diagnosed her with obsessive-compulsive personality disorder to distract her, but she raised her eyebrows, pencil shavings around her nose and a fat smudge on her lip, and told me not to tell her anymore Psychology Nonsense. She left a big red capital f stain on my desk and when I woke up I was holding onto a corner of skin on my wrist, pressing butterfly wings into my flesh with my fingernails.

No prophetic dreams. God did not speak to me. I have no heavenly message, no moral guidance, no earthly task. My power will go to waste.

In the shower I contemplate the idea that I can still see myself, even if no one else can. My hackneyed skin, my rawboned fingernails, buildups of calcium and finger-dust. I can see flowers blooming on my knuckles, skinned reds, and I wonder when my veins got so blue. I smell like water and when I slowly dry myself off, I check twice to see if I still appear in the mirror, dazed and tall. I draw butterfly wings on the soaked glass and fail to attach them to a body.

I stand in my kitchen for three long minutes. I realize, shakily, that this is the first day of my two-week vacation, and that I'm not in Portugal, Morocco, or Australia. I bite my lip. Seventeen years of childhood dreaming, straight down the drain. Okay.

Well, I suppose this makes me a superhero, then. Maybe God never directly spoke to any of the past heroes. I hesitate and sit down on a bendable chair. Or maybe—maybe it's a test.

Yes, I think. A test. A test.

I rise.

=

"Pancho" Villa's last words were, "Don't let it end like this. Tell 'em I have said something," delivered just before his subsequent assassination.

Robert F. Kennedy, the lovely attorney general, said, "Is someone hurt?" before he lapsed into a coma he would not wake from. Pablo Picasso went out with a "Drink to me!" and Karl Marx ended with his, "Last words are for fools who haven't said enough!" The modest Che Guevara said, "Shoot, you are only going to kill a man," Harry Houdini whispered, "I'm tired of fighting," and our Mother Teresa said what we'd all expect: "Jesus, I love you. Jesus, I love you."

My mother said, "More pain medication, please?"

I bit my lip, hard. The nurse shrugged her shoulders and went for the cabinet. We came back and my mother was gone, all shadows layered on my feet and whiteness seeping into her palms. The doctor said I wouldn't understand, and said that was okay. I said, I'll understand. Someday, I'll understand. I became interested in psychology the day that science failed me.

I think about it, and I don't know. My mother left me with something, some words from a small voice. She was hurt—I think. I've drunk at her, for her, against her, but not yet to her. My mother never said quite enough, not for her ruptured throat or her embodied scream. My mother may have been simply a woman, and she may have been exhausted, and she may have loved something, and it might have been me. I don't know.

I have read twelve books. I have read all editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—some twice. I have interviewed psychologists, therapists, psychiatrists. I have spoken, I have read, I have learned. I don't think of it as science. It is not classifying the concrete, measuring falling bodies and warping the speed of light and comprehending bits of light on a plant leaf; it's your brain, abstract and cushy and unexpanded, wheezing and breathing under the impatience of your skull.

And that's all.

But don't worry. I'll tell them you said something.

=

I prick myself on three butter knives before I decide that they would be too difficult to wield as weapons. I frown at the spoons—the only damage I can picture them doing would be to get under the eyelid, spoon out chunks of violent white and purple eyeball out. I tear at my lip. No, that won't do. I'm a superhero, not Your Friendly Neighborhood Serial Killer. There's a very fine line.

I hold up a fork and smile into the prongs, until my teeth are white, broken-up smudges on their fortified skin. Forks hurt, I reason, drawing it near my arm, imagining burrowing deep inside. Forks hurt.

I tuck three inside my pocket. It's not a semi-automatic and it's not a pair of iron fists and it's not a gigantic sword and it's not a hyperspace blaster, but it will have to do. For now, at least. Maybe when I prove myself, He'll send something more substantial, something more intimidating.

As I head out the door, I reason that maybe it's a part of my superhero persona. You look at my weapons and you see some forks, prongs sticking up like infallible butterfly antennae. You look at me and you see the background, a street, gray ground and even grayer skies. You look at me with my forks and you see nothing, and you look at me and you will see everything reflected in the shiny metal, all in good time.

I stop at the doorway. "Evil villains," I say, "here I come."

=

Halfway down the street I realize I don't have a name.

I walk back inside. The women whose bags are plucked out of their small hands, the men who are pushed up against redbrick apartment alleyways, the small boys who couldn't hold onto their lollypop sticks, the girls whose bicycle handles are ripped from their blond butterfly hands—they will have to wait.

=

Invisible Man.

X.

The Transparent Man.

NO, I write.

What You Don't See Com

I stop. X.

(Your/The?) Average Joe.

Scratched out. Haphazard eraser marks, tire tracks, crystal shavings.

Anybody.

I hesitate.

I could be anyone. Anyone at all. A flash of silver, a blur in front of you, colorless and sleek, the unmistakable smell of your death, the victims cheering in the background, their wails and screams and laughs of joy all coming together to well in my ears like a thick cloud falling from the barest reaches of the universe, the sky turning blue and tinder and with age, and you wonder who I could've been, me with my butterfly wings and my bare back, who I have been all along—

I crumple the paper up and smile to myself. Anybody, I think, as my voice evacuates the room, as the power pounding in my temples subsides. Any body.

=

I press my back against the wall and drop down, until I'm sitting on a damp patch of sidewalk. I have walked all over this neighborhood—up and down the streets, around the corners, venturing barely into the downtown area; I have teased my feet at the entrances to buildings, shops, apartments; I have stared at shadows until I have fully discerned that they were really just blackened reflections of trees, not secret enemies or disturbed poltergeists or anything that could possibly be a job for Invisible Ma—The Anybody.

I fiddle with the fork handles in my pocket and wince when I get jabbed unexpectedly by a prong. The silver is cold and metallic underneath my touch, the intensity worming its way under my fingers, and my head pounds, faint war drums and breaking hammers underneath a league of bone. My fingers twitter and underneath my skin, I am shedding seven thousand butterflies from seven thousand cocoons, breaking out of a thin, leafy skin to find me on the outside: alive and malfunctioning, because there is nothing.

No women getting shaken down in dark corners. No men with missing items of great importance. No aspiring evils, no newly-waged wars to clean up, no street gangs who need to be torn down to size; nothing. The thrill of feeling big and powerful and invisible in my tennis shoes, baggy jeans, white t-shirt and brown jacket, the lining of forks in my pocket and the name I wear encrusted around my neck as I touch on the loose skin there (Anybody, any body)—it amounts to nothing. The air is empty and I am nothing.

I close my eyes for a moment and I wonder if Spider-Man ever had a sleepless night when the crime was low. If Batman ever wandered down the streets and found no one willing to challenge him. If Superman ever had an off day, a day without stress. If there's something wrong with my power—with my invisibility.

I blanch with realization and my eyes fish themselves open.

=

I have to test it, I think. I have to.

I close my eyes in the middle of the crowd and I stop. I will myself to be a blank space. I halt my feet and I ground my toes into the lips of my shoes. I close my mouth and hold it there, zipped shut. I do not move.

Someone's shoulder hits my back, hard, and their bag presses into my skin. On the other side of my body I can feel the scraping feet of a baby, and a wail echoes past. Someone's full body slams into mine, and I launch forward, pressing on the backs of someone's sandals. Around me, I can feel it, hear it: green sweaters, pink and brown skin, dark hoods, cloistered voices and humming electronic devices strapped onto oranges, purples and reds. Above me tilts a world, a moon of white and blue, and for a moment, I leave my sockets, my eardrums, my nerves and my throat behind. On the back of my eyelid I can see a butterfly, and it stays there, small wings and a thumping heart I can hear in my chest.

"Hey," someone snaps, and I can feel it all over again: the restoration of my body, the sapping weight returning into my soles. "Keep it moving, buddy."

A web coats my throat and a stomach of panic is formed deep in my gut. I dodge seven million warm bodies, their flesh tingling and buzzing against me, and I have lost the will to speak.

=

When I was young, I liked birds.

I would make up names for them. Timmy, with the red breast and black spots; Julia, with the blue head and her perishing eyes; Robert, with his downy feathers and tight chirp; Simon, and his lovely, small feet and big fat wings—and every time a similar-looking bird would come around, one with red feathers and white spots, or a brown head and the same eyes, I would pause and call out their name ("Timmy? Is that—Julia? Hello?" ), hope ravaging my stomach and biting it to bits.

My father thought it was adorable. He would take me into the backyard and smile and help me name some of them (Robert was entirely his idea). Once he had paused and asked me if I could name one Ashton, for him.

"That's what I would've named you, you know," he said, quietly, and his arm slipped off from around my shoulder. He tugged at his silver wristwatch and stood, slowly. "Your mother didn't like it. Ashton."

She made Popsicle sticks, then. She would give me a yellow one and touch me on the nose. I would see her in the window, as she slowly crept back down the dark hallways, and I knew she would be back asleep in a matter of minutes, drying her sticky hands on a perpetual nightgown, impressed into her skin. She never took it off.

And I would grit my teeth and throw it behind the tree and yell at squirrels when they came near it, and in the middle of the night I would begin to crave the Popsicle, the yellow taste on my tongue, and sometimes I would begin to cry, quietly; cry because if I went down the hallway and found my mother in her pajamas with her eyes wide open, sitting in her chair with the television volume all the way down, I knew she wouldn't make me another one, knew that she might not even respond.

The last time I saw a pigeon with a remarkably blue head, little black spots down their body, a crisp chirp and small yellow feet, I hesitated. "Timmy?" I called out. "Julia?"

The bird cocked its head. Two men walking side-by-side, their arms entwined, stared at me as they went by. I stood on the sidewalk and wanted to cry, again, but I kept the tears behind a wall of silence, coating my eyes with transparency.

"Robert," I said. "Simon."

I never named one Ashton. I don't know where all the birds in my life have gone.

=

The waitress who serves me has a butterfly penned up in her hair, blue and plastic, dotted with sparkles of green. "Can I take your order?" she says.

I freeze. My head is buried in my arms, open to the small bits of light leaking through my wrists, and I watch the way my skin glows bright pink in the dark. I count to three.

"Hello?" she continues. "Are you all right?"

I raise my head and look at her. Puddles form beneath her eyes. She turns her head and the pin catches the light, its wings illuminating with a white anger. She clears her throat and begins, again, taking out a pen from behind a shivering of blond hair. "Can I take yo—"

I look down and shake my head. "I'm malfunctioning today," I mutter.

"Mmm," she murmurs, the universal and international symbol for half-listeners and nonbelievers, and she manages it through a pink-lipsticked smile. The lovers of her lips wait calmly, and she shifts her weight onto one leg.

I shake my head. "You don't understand," I say. "I'm not invisible anymore."

She outright laughs this time. I bury my head beneath blankets of flesh and dark. "I'll get you some decaf," she says, a voice emanating from the light between my skin and the table, the smattering of yellow in-between.

I bring my chin up when I hear the pound of a lowered cup of coffee. Without looking at her, I mechanically reach for a packet of sugar and rip off the top, slowly. The little white specks tumble out like crumbled, discarded stars. They dissolve inside the coffee in a torrent of shame and glee, and before long, they can't be seen, lost amidst a mass of raw sienna.

"My name's Judy, by the way," she says, and there is a shy girl on her tongue, speaking to me through the thickness of her musty voice. Her tone is too dark for a small woman with blond hair and a butterfly pinned at the top, stuck on with plastic and hope.

"What's yours?"

I pretend I don't hear her. Three seconds pass in a burdensome silence. I can feel it hearken on my shoulders and shivers run inexplicably down my spine.

"So you were, uh," she says, hesitating at the edge of the table, and I can hear the giggle quiver beneath her voice, "invisible, then? Is that what you said—invisible?"

"I was. I was a superhero, you know," I nod into my overhearing coffee. "Well, I am a superhero, really. The Anybody. You might have heard of me."

She snickers again, and the pen drops onto the floor, sliding out from an avalanche of bright hair. I lean over to pick it up but she beats me to it, and I catch the flicker of color on her nails, the stringing of color around her eyes, the brushed color across her skin. "You're kind of hilarious," she says, and something in her voice tells me it's a compliment. "For a superhero, anyway."

I reach into the depths of my coffee with a skinny wood stick, twirling it between my fingers. "I'm not a superhero. I'm nothing," I mutter. "The Nobody, more like."

She turns her head at me again, tilting it to the left. "Well, I don't know about that," she says, slipping the pen behind her ear, in-between strands of white-gold mass, tangible and parted. Her hair has the look of being frayed—a thousand different strands, layered one on top of the other, distinguished by their own individual line, drawing a map to the back of her head.

"You know, I kind of always thought those superhero guys," she continues, goaded by my unresponsive mouth. "I always thought that they should be reminded every once in a while that they are someone. A man, you know—same skin and all. Just like the rest of us." She pauses. "The Somebody," she says, and smiles.

I lower my eyes and give a scholarly nod. "Mmm," I say.

I count to three again, and I make it halfway to two when she interrupts. "I think you'll be all right," she says.

She holds her breath and walks away, and this time she doesn't return. The waitress who asks if I want a refill has red hair and a nose like a bent pipe. The tip I leave is modest, a smiling president to bid her farewell. He's more qualified for the job, I figure.

=

I give it two days.

I walk outside and it's nighttime. Something calls to me, in my gut, tells me to get back out there, to find some evil and reveal it, out from beneath its cloak of skullduggery darkness. And here, I can tell that I'm invisible again. I can feel the function inside my skin, vibrating just around the veins and muscle and cells—the invisibility, the transparency, the free feeling and the drained quality.

I stretch my fingers and brace my shoulders. The street is gone, leaving behind faint whispers of dusty sky and deserted cars. I finger my vacant pockets and the forks greet me, solid and cold to the touch. Not invisible, I think. Not really.

Empty, I think.

Someone does walk by. They have their hood up and their fists shoved similarly into their pockets, holding qualms of Earth inside. I watch them walk by with an open mouth. They do not turn to me, nor make any move in my direction; they simply walk, their body a mass of quivering dark brown, orangey black, sexless and solitary.

I lean against another wall, but this time, I refuse to let myself sink down. I feel small, I think. I feel gone. I close my fists and imagine I am holding seeds inside—an egg, a fruit, maybe.

I watch them leave and wonder if they were up to something. If maybe they're going to go rape a girl, kill a man, steal a baby. If I should run after them—stalk them, keep watch, make a tab. A mental note, at least.

"A fruit," I repeat to myself, aloud. "A lemon, I think." I roll my fingers along my kneecap. The person who walked by turns and looks back, twice, and on the lamppost above, a moth flickers, disguised as a butterfly underneath skinny wings and a cigarette body, turning the light brown and orange for mere moments.

"Yeah," I say. "A lemon sounds about right."

=

There are things I wanted to tell them. Before they left.

Maybe I would have told my dad about the days where I was interested in airplanes. Or maybe I'd tell him about the time I snuck out to go to a party and ended up playing blackjack in the dark with my friend Ross. Or maybe I'd tell him about the sips of alcohol I had stolen off his glass at Christmas Eve parties. Or maybe I'd tell him about the classical music I played really low on my radio, or the candles and chocolates I hid under my bed and saved for rainy days, or all the anonymous poetry I submitted into the local literary magazine. Maybe I'd tell him what I was ashamed of—maybe I would leak blue streams of shamefaced, dour facts from a soppy tongue, and maybe I would have him know me, for a little bit, between the sickness and the sorry.

And maybe I would've let my mom in on all the nights I slept soundly while she cried down the hallway. Maybe I would tell her about the days I snuck money into her wallet instead of out of it. Maybe I would tell her about all the storms I watched outside my window and whispered away from her window. Maybe I would tell her about all the times I cleaned the kitchen and hid inside my room, so maybe she'd think Dad had done it. Maybe I would tell her about the times I sat beside her bed while she slept and considered running a comb through her underwater hair. Maybe I would tell her about the nights she cried and I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep soundly and wracked my brain for a way out of this tissue-paper body, these revolted tears. Maybe I would let her forget, for a little while, between the love and the closed eyes.

Maybes are wasted on the disappeared, the vanished and the gone. I caress my leg late into the night, and sometimes I wake up to find streams of water on my pillow. Drool or tears, I don't know; but in the morning light their faces will fade away from my dreams. Should-haves run to fill the void.

=

I have fallen asleep outside on the sidewalk.

My feet ache around the ankles from sleeping with my knees up and tight; my jaw cracks and I realize I have been grinding my teeth in the nighttime, making a sound like clippers and rusty tongs. When I blink, my fluttering eyelids make noise, quivering on the edges of division.

The panic wells up my throat quickly, and I can feel a burst dam somewhere in the back of my cheeks. I rush to stand, a sudden manic energy in my feet. In doing so, I stumble into a passer-by, who backs up and raises his arms. I catch a blur of skin, the faint color of red, the bristles of a gray street. "Hey!"

"I—I'm sorry, I'm so sorry," I blurt, and then my head suddenly aches with the realization that something is terribly wrong. My skin turns white with premature death and I then stumble in the reverse, my back slamming back into the wall.

"Hey, hey," the guy repeats, and his face softens visibly. As I find my footing, I observe the lines, the crease-folds on his face; the patience in his eyes, the kindness around his mouth.

"You can see me," I confess. I mean it as a question but it comes as a soft, uneasy pant.

"Uh... you okay?" he manages. He tugs on the sleeve of his red sweater and smiles at me, a grim, upturned jaw, composed of friendliness and anxiety, something lost and something loved. I run a finger of tongue over my teeth, touching down on them like the spines of books.

"You can see me," I repeat, and I hold his eyes for the seconds I can manage to keep them there. I notice them, a dusky brown. In the back of my head I can see my own gray eyes, impressed upon the texture of my eyelids. "But I'm—I'm invisible—"

"You're—you're what?"

"You don't understand." I realize I'm hunching over, becoming smaller under his neck, his gaze. "I'm—I'm invisible—"

He steps forward and touches my forearm, draping his spotty, stolid fingers near my elbow. The touch scares me and I hold in place, the blood pumping furiously from the contents of my heart. "No," he says. "No, you're not. Are you okay?"

"But I'm—I'm a superhero—I was given these powers for a reason, you know," I explain to him, the words tripping from my tongue faster than I can hold onto them. "I'm Anybody—The Anybody. I—I fight crime, you see—and I'm going to save people, I mean, I have saved people—"

"Look, I'm sorry," he says, and his fingers hesitate around my arm. Rather than leave, he tightens his grip, and I can feel my skin bend underneath his. "But you're, um, not invisible, Mr., uh—Mr. Anybody." He laughs and it's distant wind chimes in dead nighttime and pounding fists on dainty tables, it's the faint pounding of protruding feet and it's the casual utterance of odor inside a hospital building. He laughs and my defenses crack.

I look at him and open my mouth. I can feel my cheeks slowly stain themselves with red and pink, bruises and fire on pale skin. Suddenly his hand leeches off my arm, and he jumps, physically; it is an entire body maneuver, and I find him suddenly inches further away. A pair of orange-brown wings dart in front of my vision before it disappears, and the ecstatic flight of a butterfly worms its way through the air, away from us.

"Oh god," he breathes, his speech suddenly accelerated. "Oh crap. God, this is why I moved to the city! To get away from the things!"

I look at him carefully. Something in my brain clicks, distantly, and for a moment, I forget things. "Are you—are you all right?"

He turns to me and there is a new whiteness in his eyes, floating around the pupil. The sun finds its white-hot reflection on his cheeks and rests there. "I, um, I kind of have a phobia," he admits, and suddenly we share a blush, spread across two separate sets of cheeks.

Phobia, I think. Phobia. An irrational, persistent, and intense fear of something not normally perceived as scary or threatening. Coupled with avoidance and high levels of anxiety. Most common form of anxiety, in fact. Both nature and nurture can be taken into account—children who observe parents with a specific phobia are more likely to develop the same phobia themselves. Popular phobias include claustrophobia, agoraphobia, arachnophobia, glossophobia, acrophobia, trypanophobia and coulrophobia. Phobias. I know phobias.

"Strange, I know, I know," he says, scratching the base of his neck and smiling at me. "Sorry. Are you—really okay? Haha, um—just—I—"

He's scared, I think. He's scared.

"Yeah," I say. "Yeah, I'm fine."

Look, I'm sorry, but you're, um, not invisible, Mr. Anybody.

I break. In my throat looms a wary silence. I hold my breath.

I'm not invisible because I am here with a man on the street who has my arm under his grasp and who could tear the skin from my limbs and who could take all the forks in my pocket and stab each one through my legs and who could deliver them into the sweaty palms of a dirty street; who could take me into that dark alleyway, who could take everything I have ever known and spin it; a man who has told me that I am not invisible.

Because I never fought a villain and I never saved anyone and I never really found a weapon and I never named a bird Ashton and I never asked "why?" and because I never spoke to him before he closed the door and because I never told her before she exited with an exhale and because God never sent me the message or the transparency and because I never quite understood suicide and because I have been slowly eating plastic apples and lemons I didn't realize were fake.

Because I am with a man on the street who is afraid of butterflies and because I am so much more.

I still don't understand suicide. Somewhere, in the back of my head, my mother cranes her neck and weeps, silently. Psychology offers me its shoulder and I think I'm afraid. Apples and trees, after all. I bite my lip. I suppose I am a walnut.

"You know," I begin, and my voice slowly returns, out of a gummy hidey-hole I was unaware existed. "I know some stuff about psychology. I think I could, uh—help you with that."

"What?" he says, and his voice cracks, a skittish line between the words.

"I could help you. With your fear of butterflies, I mean."

I hold out my hand, and I look down at the skin, white and blue and red. I hold out my hand and I can see the fragments of pink. I hold out my hand and I remember the lines she used to trace down my veins and I remember when he used to pull me up into tree branches. I hold out my hand and I understand no special great truth, no suicide and no depression, no envy and no malice, and I hold out my hand knowing that I won't.

I hold out my hand and I know that he can see it. "Forget what I said earlier," I say. "My name is Philip."