📲 “The person you are trying to reach is not available, please leave your message after the beep... BIP.”
"Oh huh, hi Clark, this is Lana. It's—" There was a soft chuckle. "Well it's been a minute hasn't it? I don't know if you remember me well, but I hope you remember me enough to call back. Something happened to me recently, and I could use your help. I think... Hum... Yeah. Also, I'll be in Metropolis for a while ahah, so don't get spooked if you see my face here or there." Another awkward chuckle. "Okay," She giggled, "this is goodbye now! Take care of yourself! And my best to your folks at home!"
//The song paired with this response.
The lock caught halfway through the turn. Clark shifted both paper grocery bags into the crook of one arm and tried again, applying the careful sliver of pressure required by an old apartment door that had swollen crookedly in its frame. Somewhere inside one bag, a jar knocked against a can somewhere beneath his arm. The corner of a cereal box dug into his ribs. A jar knocked against a can somewhere beneath his arm. The corner of a cereal box dug into his ribs. His messenger bag hung heavily from one shoulder, overstuffed with notebooks and folders he had carried home despite promising himself—again—that he would leave work at work.
The deadbolt finally surrendered with a clack. Clark pressed his shoulder against the door and entered the apartment sideways, bringing the city in with him: the distant complaint of traffic, the murmur of voices several stories below, the fading pulse of a siren already moving away. The apartment had held on to the day’s warmth. It met him in one still, close breath, carrying the faint scent of old wood, yesterday’s coffee, and the basil plant struggling valiantly for its life on the kitchen windowsill. Clark nudged the door shut with his heel.
“Home sweet home,” he murmured.
On the small table against the wall, the red light of the answering machine blinked. Once, twice.
Clark let his messenger bag slide from his shoulder and caught it before it could strike the hardwood and disturb the woman living beneath him. He lowered the groceries beside it, straightened, and rolled one shoulder. Habit more than discomfort. His body had learned the shape of an ordinary man’s fatigue even when it could not quite share in it. His keys landed in the little ceramic dish beside the door.
The light continued blinking. Clark glanced at it while working his overcoat from his shoulders. He hung the coat from the wall hook, then crossed the apartment with his suit jacket already sliding down his arms. The answering machine waited patiently beside the house phone, its little red eye bright in the dim room.
He draped his jacket over the back of a chair and pressed the button.
The machine clicked. Clark pressed the button and the tape began to turn behind the plastic casing. “The person you are trying to reach is not available,” the recorded voice announced. “Please leave your message after the beep…” A sharp electronic chirp followed. He hooked two fingers beneath the knot of his tie and pulled it loose.
“The person you are trying to reach is not available,” the recording began. “Please leave your message after the beep…” A chirp followed. “Oh huh, hi Clark, this is Lana.” His hands stopped against his collar. “It’s—” A soft chuckle breathed through the speaker. “Well, it’s been a minute, hasn’t it?”
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Grass crowded warmly around Clark’s shoulders, its blades bending beneath the weight of his body and brushing the bare skin of his forearms whenever the breeze passed through the field. The Kent farmhouse stood somewhere behind them, concealed by the low rise of the land. Its porch light cast a distant amber glow against the darkness, too faint to compete with the stars. They reached from one horizon to the other, scattered so densely above the farm that Clark could not look at them without feeling the impossible distances between each point of light. Some burned clearly enough for him to distinguish their colors. Others were already dead, their final light still crossing the emptiness long after whatever had lived beneath them was gone.
Lana lay beside him in the grass. Their shoulders nearly touched. Her hair had spread across the ground, darkened by the night until only the strands nearest her face caught the moonlight. One of her hands rested over her stomach. The other idly worried a blade of grass between her fingers.
“They’re beautiful,” she said, “but they always make me feel small.” Clark turned his head toward her. She continued looking upward, her face quiet beneath the stars. Clark watched her instead—the subtle rise and fall of her chest, the movement of her eyes as she searched the sky, the tiny crease between her eyebrows that appeared whenever she was thinking too hard about something she had not yet decided how to say.
“I like it,” he said. Lana glanced at him. “I like feeling small.” Clark returned his gaze to the heavens. The darkness seemed to go on forever, but Lana’s shoulder remained only an inch from his own. “We’re all just tiny creatures, little aliens, holding on to each other, out in the middle of nowhere. I think it’s perfect.”
Clark stared upward for another moment before pushing himself upright. Grass clung to the back of his shirt. He planted his hands beside his knees and raised his face toward the stars, drawing a breath deep enough to fill his lungs.
“Hey!” he shouted. The word flew over the field, startling something small into movement within the crops. Clark cupped his hands around his mouth. “Can you see me? I’m down here!” His voice rolled toward the dark outline of the barn, across the fields beyond it, and up into a sky too vast to answer. “You left me behind,” he called, louder still, “but I’m okay!”
Lana laughed behind him, bright and startled. Clark’s own grin pulled at his cheeks. “I’m happy!” The last word disappeared among the stars.
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“I don’t know if you remember me well,” Lana continued through the answering machine, “but I hope you remember me enough to call back.” Clark stood in the center of his apartment with his tie crooked beneath his open collar. The narrow end had slipped from his fingers. A breath left him through his nose—something too soft and uneven to become a laugh.
He pulled the tie free and laid it across the back of the chair with his jacket. His hands moved automatically after that, taking up the ordinary labor of coming home while his attention remained fixed upon the small speaker across the room.
Clark carried the grocery bags into the kitchen. The paper crackled beneath his grip as he set them upon the counter. He removed a carton of milk, a loaf of bread, two cans of soup. Each item was placed with unnecessary care, his hearing narrowed around the faint static of the recording.
“Something happened to me recently,” Lana said, “and I could use your help.”
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The barn was quiet enough for Clark to hear dust settling. Late-afternoon sunlight entered through the spaces between the wooden boards, laying long golden bars across the floor. Flecks drifted through them, turning lazily in the warm air. The smell of hay and sun-baked timber clung to everything. Somewhere within the wall, an insect scratched against the wood.
Clark sat on an overturned crate with his elbows resting upon his knees. Across from him, beneath a heavy canvas covering, waited the shape his parents had hidden for most of his life.
The object was too low to be a tractor and too smooth beneath the tarp to be any ordinary piece of farm equipment. The canvas sagged into unfamiliar angles. A narrow point rose near one end, resembling the nose of something built to move forward at a speed no vehicle on Earth could reach. Clark had already been told what lay beneath it. Knowing had not made looking any easier.
His fingers knitted together between his knees. He stared until the shadow cast by the covered vessel lengthened across the barn floor and reached the toes of his boots. Then Clark stood; the crate scraped faintly behind him. He crossed the barn one measured step at a time, bits of straw breaking beneath his soles. When he reached the vessel, he hesitated with one hand suspended over the canvas. The fabric was coarse beneath his fingertips when he finally touched it, warmed by the sunlight that had entered through the wall.
Clark curled his hand around the edge. The tarp came away with a dry, dragging rasp. Dust rose around him. Beneath it rested a small silver craft, its surface darkened and scarred from a journey Clark could not imagine. Earth had left its mark upon the vessel as well. Hay had gathered around its base. A spiderweb stretched between one curved edge and the floor.
It seemed impossibly small. Clark stared into the hollow where he had once lain. His hand found the edge of the opening. The metal remained cool despite the heat trapped inside the barn. No manufacturer’s name had been stamped into it. No serial number. No familiar letters instructed him in understanding what he was seeing. Something red lay folded within. Clark reached inside. The fabric slid beneath his fingertips with an unexpected softness. He gathered it carefully and drew it from the vessel, unfolding it as it emerged. More and more of it spilled over his hands, vivid against the muted brown of the barn. Staring at the crest at its center, He traced one edge of the crest with his thumb. Clark stood alone in the gold-streaked quiet, holding the only thing left behind by people whose faces he could not remember.
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The refrigerator hummed. Clark blinked down at the milk carton, still held several inches from the open shelf. Cold air moved across his wrist. He placed it inside and closed the door, but his palm remained flat against the handle afterward.
Something happened to me.
Lana’s uncertainty troubled him more than panic might have. She had tucked the admission between chuckles and pauses, softening the edges as though asking for Clark’s help was something she needed to apologize for.
His head turned toward the answering machine. The tape hissed quietly. “Also, I’ll be in Metropolis for a while, ahah, so don’t get spooked if you see my face here or there.” Another awkward chuckle passed through the speaker.
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The road stretched between the fields in a pale strip, dust lingering above it after the passage of a truck. Lana stood before Clark with both of her hands enclosed in his. He had reached for them before beginning. Perhaps because he knew he would not manage the words without something familiar anchoring him. Perhaps because some selfish part of him believed that holding on tightly enough might prevent the distance he was about to place between them.
Clark looked down at their joined hands before forcing his eyes back to her face. “I’m going to Metropolis.” The words sounded different outside his head.
The breeze moved through the crops beyond the road, bending their green stalks in a long ripple. Lana said nothing at first. Her thumbs rested motionless against his knuckles. Clark felt the moment she understood that he did not mean a visit.
He spoke about the city. About the opportunity waiting there. About wanting to write stories that mattered and see something beyond the roads they had traveled their whole lives. The explanations came carefully, one after another, polished during sleepless hours until they should have sounded convincing. Lana listened. She did not pull her hands away. That made it worse.
The sun warmed the back of Clark’s neck. A bird called from one of the telephone wires overhead. Farther down the road, heat shimmered above the pavement, turning the horizon uncertain. Clark’s grip loosened, then tightened again.
He had imagined Lana angry. He had prepared himself for accusations, for tears, for every reason he should remain in Smallville. He had not prepared for the quiet way she looked at him, as though she had always known there would come a morning when the boundaries of the town could no longer contain him.
The conversation ended gradually, with longer silences growing between shorter sentences until no words remained that could change what was going to happen. He held her hands while the light shifted across the road. He held them while the breeze lifted strands of hair against her cheek. He held them through the final, unbearable pause in which either of them might have asked him to stay.
Lana’s fingers slipped from his one at a time. Clark’s hands remained raised between them after hers were gone, still curved around the shape they had left behind.
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The city's traffic moved beyond the apartment walls. Hundreds of voices overlapped throughout the building and along the streets beneath it, none belonging to the girl who had stood with him between the fields. Not anymore.
But Lana was somewhere within that noise now. Clark looked instinctively toward the window, as though he might find her face among the countless reflections moving across the glass towers beyond it. The thought of seeing her unexpectedly—crossing a street, emerging from a café, standing beneath the shadow of the Daily Planet—sent a strange pressure through his chest. It felt too much like the first sight of the Kent farmhouse after a long journey home.
“Okay,” Lana said. A giggle escaped her. “This is goodbye now!”
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The bus doors folded inward with a rubber-edged thump. Clark climbed the steps carrying a suitcase in one hand. The driver barely glanced at his ticket before jerking his chin toward the aisle. Warm, stale air met Clark inside, carrying the smells of vinyl seats, old coffee, and the sharp chemical trace of fuel. He found a place beside the window. The suitcase went into the compartment above him. Clark lowered himself into the seat and discovered there was no comfortable arrangement for his knees. He angled them toward the aisle, then turned his face toward the glass.
Smallville waited beyond it. The station sat quiet beneath the morning light. Familiar storefronts lined the road behind it. Every window, sign, and stretch of sidewalk belonged to a place Clark could have navigated with his eyes closed.
The engine shuddered beneath the floor, and the bus began to roll forward.
The station slid away first. Then the storefronts began passing one by one: the diner, the hardware store, the narrow brick buildings whose upper windows had remained unchanged for as long as Clark could remember. The tires carried him across streets he had walked to school, ridden by bicycle, and crossed in secret at speeds no one could be permitted to see. He watched until the buildings thinned. Houses replaced them. Then barns. Then open fields reaching toward the pale horizon.
A sensation gathered low in Clark’s stomach, tightening each time something familiar vanished behind the bus. He had expected excitement to arrive the instant they passed the edge of town. Instead, the farther Smallville receded, the more keenly he felt every mile opening beneath him. The water tower appeared between two distant rows of trees. Clark twisted slightly in his seat to keep it within view. Though, like everything else, it grew smaller. Then the curve of the road took it from him. He faced forward again, though his reflection continued looking back from the glass.
A flock of blackbirds burst suddenly from the crops the bus was passing. They rose as one dark shape before separating, wings cutting through the sunlight as they climbed above the bus. Clark followed them with his eyes. And for a moment, the glass was gone, and the roof of the bus vanished beneath him.
Clark was high above the Kent farm with the wind against his face and the entire property spread below. The farmhouse appeared small enough to cover with his palm. The barn roof gleamed red beneath the sun. Fields fitted together in long green and gold rectangles, divided by narrow roads and lines of trees. He could see his mother’s garden and his father’s truck. The worn path through the grass where Clark had walked between the house and barn thousands of times before realizing he would someday count how many remained.
A dark bird swept across his path, close enough for Clark to see the individual feathers along its wings. It banked sharply, surrendering itself to the current, and flew toward the open horizon.
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The answering machine clicked. The tape continued turning for another second before stopping. Silence returned to the apartment.
Clark stood beside the kitchen counter with one shoe removed and the other still on his foot. Groceries waited half-unpacked around him. A can of soup sat near his elbow. The loaf of bread had slumped sideways against a box of cereal.
Across the room, Lana’s number remained visible on the caller display. Clark looked at it for a long moment. Then he crossed the apartment. His remaining shoe was abandoned beside the first. He stepped over his messenger bag, reached the small table, and lowered himself into the chair beside the phone. His hand hovered above the receiver.
Years had passed since the field. Since the barn. Since Lana’s fingers had slipped from his on the road and Smallville had disappeared beyond the bus window. Yet her voice had crossed the distance as though none of it were insurmountable. She needed him. Whatever had happened, she had thought of Clark.
As his fingers closed around the receiver, a cry tore through the city. It came from far below and several blocks east, faint enough to disappear beneath the traffic for every ordinary person in the building. Clark heard the scrape of tires first. The violent crunch of metal. Glass scattering over pavement. Then a voice rose above the sudden chorus of screams. “Superman!”
Clark stopped with the receiver half-lifted from its cradle. His eyes closed. For one heartbeat, he sat between two calls. Lana’s number waited beneath his hand. Somewhere beyond the apartment walls, a damaged engine coughed smoke into the street. Metal groaned under shifting weight. A heartbeat raced erratically beneath the noise of the crowd.
He lowered the receiver and his glasses landed beside the phone. The buttons of his shirt opened beneath his hands as he crossed the room, white fabric parting to reveal blue and the bright curve of the crest beneath it. His abandoned work clothes marked his path through the apartment: tie across the chair, jacket over its back, shoes beside the kitchen, shirt falling from his shoulders. Behind him, the answering machine sat silent beside the telephone. Lana’s number remained on the display. His apartment remained suspended in the ordinary evening he had almost been permitted to have.
The drapes snapped outward in his wake, twisting together before loosening and drifting back into the empty room.
