An Eventful Week

by Susmita Ramani

On Monday, having just been released from a seven-year prison term for robbery, I was supervising a museum heist with a bunch of guys, many of whom I’d met on the inside. On Tuesday, while rushing to meet a fence named Ralph in the Flatiron District who was supposed to sell me fake IDs so my co-conspirators and I could quickly flee the country after the heist, I fell into one of those hatches behind bagelries from which flour wafts up to pedestrians, but the cloud that enveloped me was radioactive. On Wednesday, I was in a coma, and a nurse named Mabel read me the full English translation of “The Little Prince.” On Thursday, I awoke, feeling refreshed, remembered the story Mabel had read to me, and was stunned to realize that I now had superhuman strength and could make myself invisible. On Friday, I finally finished the paperwork to get out of the hospital (which took so long, I nearly used my newfound abilities to vanish), learned that I was able to run, fly, and swim at supersonic speeds, really checked out the city, and realized how crime-ridden it is. Over the weekend, I took Mabel for a flight around the city, designed myself a costume with a cape, tights, and mask (in aquamarine spandex with yellow lightning bolts), put it on, and began my new life of listening to the police scanner from the roof of my high-rise, silhouetted against the moon by night, ready at any moment to leap into the fray and fight for the people, starting with foiling the museum heist and telling my former associates to stay clean or else I’d have to take them in.

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Susmita Ramani’s work has appeared in over thirty different publications, including Six Sentences, and she has a novella coming out in 2026. She lives in the Bay Area with her husband, two teenage daughters, and a dozen pets. See her WordPress for fiction and Instagram for poetry.