The Flash Reverses Time

DC Comics, November 1990, #44 “Never Look Back, Flash Your Life Might Be Gaining On You” When I’m running across the city on the crowded streets to home, when, in a blur, the grass turns brown beneath my feet, the asphalt steams under every step and the maple leaves sway on the branches in my wake, and the people look, look in that bewildered way, in my direction, I imagine walking slowly into my past among them at a pace at which we can look one another in the eye and begin to make changes in the future from our memories of the past— the bottom of a bottomless well, you may think, but why not dream a little: our past doesn’t contradict our future; they’re swatches of the same fabric stretching across our minds, one image sewn into another, like the relationship between a foot and a boot, covariant in space and time— one moves along with the other, like an actor in a shadow play— like a streak of scarlet light across the skyline of your city sweeping the debris, which is simply confetti, candy wrappers, a can of soda, all the experience of a day discarded and now picked up even down to the youthful screams of play that put smiles on the faces of the adults who hear remnants of their own voices through a doorway leading back to a sunrise they faintly remember.