Alice Lane photographed by Stacey Mark for Purple Fashion Fall/Winter 2011
A Super Power
“If you had the power to fly or to be invisible, which would you choose?” I asked everyone that question to anyone. One day i asked a little boy. He plainly said that he would rather fly, with no enthusiasm in his voice. “Why would you rather fly?”, I asked the boy. He respondedd, while raising his eyes for the first time to look at me in the face, “I already have the power to be invisible.” That was when I realized that he was sitting on a bench next to a playground, with children bursting with laughter, dodging in and out of the structure, and with all of the parents pointing at which child was which, or describing the game their kids just made up, not one adult was there to flaunt him to the other parents with the new magic trick he just learned, or the amount of time he could travel across the monkey bars. He just sat there.
I sat on the bench with Ethan, the boy’s name was later revealed to me in a game. After a long discussion about how the power to fly would be used. I spotted an old woman, in her late seventies, with a spark of light in her eyes, but also a light of fear sunk deep into the color of her eyes. Her eyes softened when she spotted the young boy sitting next to me, and her eyes lit up. She picked her grandson, placed a light kiss on his check, and gave a toothy smile to me. As she walked away, she raised her grandson in the air, while he spread his arms out in the air. When Ethan did that, I knew that he found a new reason why he would have the super power to fly.
