Telekinetically Yours 2

Day 2 of Five Stories in Five Days 2

Enjoy the five stories from the first round of Five Stories in Five Days, all for free:

When Mr. Fusion Finally Arrived
A Tale of Ass
Telekinetically Yours
Alien Life
Very, Very Bad Erotica

Thank you in advance for reading Day 2 of Five Stories in Five Days 2, a new campaign of mine. Normally, this sort of creative writing appears in my paid Substack (under Creative Stuff), but this week, I’ve decided to give a partial preview to free subscribers and the general public to see whether anyone might be interested in joining my larger world. 10% of my Substack is free in my Bad Online English section—just me ranting about the sloppy, slovenly English I see (and no, that doesn’t mean that I make myself out to be Shakespeare or Hemingway—I can admit that with no problem). 90% of my Substack, though, is content that’s available for only $5 a month—the price of a single, halfway-decent burger. Like my Amazon ebooks, which I’ve committed to sell forever at minimum price ($2.99 for now), I’ve made the same guarantee here: $5/month or $50/year is all I’ll ever charge you, no matter what new things I do on Substack. So, please: Enjoy the story below, but think about joining. Think about joining the dark side. We all float down here.

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Marv’s list of resentments seemed to grow as he got better at using his new telekinetic and perceptive powers. Months had passed, and Marv had learned the art of being discreet. He was well past the days of dramatically liver-punching pranksters who got behind him and wall-slamming obnoxiously barking dogs. This discreetness meant he was never caught, but it also meant that the number of annoyances he experienced never really seemed to go down because no one ever learned to stop messing with him . . . at least, not until he began a focused study of the human brain.

Marv developed a genuine interest in neuroscience and discovered that he could actually help people suffering from nerve-related issues just by gently poking, prodding, nudging, and caressing certain centers of the brain. Limping, paralysis, speech difficulties, tremors, numbness, and even personality changes all vanished, and the people who received his care saw Marv as a miracle-worker. Normally so frustrated by the stupid assholes all around him, Marv was surprised to discover he had a compassionate, caring side. At the same time, though, Marv came to realize how easy it had become to sink a telekinetic finger into someone’s brain, waggle the finger around, and instantly kill the asshole or leave him a near-vegetable with enough consciousness to be aware of his own suffering. Late at night, Marv would practice this skill on rule-ignoring bikers who would pass him—the usual rude guys (or even women) who tended to stray into the pedestrian lane for no good reason, or who would appear out of nowhere—never decelerating—right as Marv was about to cross a street or a path. After a kill, Marv would telekinetically strip the clothes off the offender, then mind-fling the body into the nearest body of water or watercourse. When the body reached the bottom, Marv would mentally pile local stones and dirt on top to keep anything from rising back to the surface. Removing clothes kept police from establishing a pattern such as “This guy likes to kill bikers.” Marv would practice using his powers to fray the clothes and turn them to dust, and he immediately saw how the skill could be applied to living things… or to parts of living things. But he hadn’t tried Thanos-dusting a person yet.

With telekinesis also came what Marv thought of as the Jedi power of Force-choking, and this became his preferred way of dealing with obnoxious pokers-from-behind. (How many of these cowardly fuckheads were there? Jesus!) Marv could sense who the guilty party was the moment he made his move, and the Force choke, with Marv always facing away from his victim, never looked as if he were the one doing it. A firm telekinetic clamp around the throat, and the victim would often drop to the ground (or be held firmly aloft by an invisible, inflexible, inexorably shrinking collar), suffering from a combination of anoxia, fear, scarily fading consciousness, and an utterly sealed-off airway. Marv often thought about how frightening it must be to be forced not to breathe, and he relished the “lesson” he was teaching. It was also a roll of the dice as to whether Marv would let the person go or let the person die. In most cases, just to be safe, Marv would let the person go. What was the fun in killing, after all, if the person didn’t live to learn a valuable moral lesson? But there were plenty of times when Marv would finish the job, just to make sure that that person never did that thing again. There were different ways to make the world a better place.

One day on the subway, a crazy-eyed man stalked in—one of those twitchy, nervous, wiry types who looked fantastically quick and fanatically strong when cornered, despite being buried under a mound of tattered, piss-stinking clothing. Marv, who saw himself as an asshole attractor, fully expected the dude to lock eyes with him. He could sense that it was about to happen this time. Disaster approached.

The more Marv studied the nature of his new powers, the better he became at tweaking people’s brains, even to the point of pacifying the unhinged. Because he was on his way to work, the last thing Marv wanted to do was to be confronted by this new idiot, then kill him in public. The problem with killing people in crowds is that witnesses are prone to drawing connections even if those connections aren’t initially obvious, and in some cases, those connections are intuitively right. It was absolutely necessary, in a crowd situation, to avoid having anyone connect Marv to whatever happened to the crazy guy. So Marv faced away from the unhinged man, who had been sweeping his piercing gaze around the room, looking for a victim to latch on to. But Marv’s new percipience allowed him to keep track of the guy who, sure enough, eventually saw Marv and started toward him. Here we go again.