Chapter 1: Flashpoint

The day that my life changed, “The Day”, as everyone has taken to calling it ... I will never forget that day, unto my dying breath.

I can’t say that it was a clear, cloudless and sunny day, full of gentle spring breezes and warm sunshine. And honestly, it wasn’t even that particular day that everything happened. But it was the day that my life changed, right before my world came crashing down, and so I think I can rightfully say that it was the asteroid that did it.

It was actually three weeks after “The Day” when my world fell apart. And as I said, I will remember that day forever; the day my wife died.

We weren’t high school sweethearts; I won’t try to say that we were. But it was magical all the same, when we met. Almost literally, in some ways; we met at a ComicCon, where she was dressed as Sailor Moon, and I’d cobbled together a vaguely decent example of a G1 Transformers armor, looking like the Autobot Jazz. I wasn’t skilled enough to make it so that I could actually ‘transform’ in the outfit, but I thought it looked pretty damned cool, and I got a few compliments on it. It was slated to possibly one of the last, if not the last ComiCon, because of the impending asteroid strike. Back at that time, it was still new and still news and still a threat that the world didn’t know how to deal with.

But when I laid eyes on her, I had a hard time thinking of anything else; even thoughts of the asteroid were silenced. I suppose, selfishly, that if was a good thing that, while she came to the ‘con with her boyfriend, she found him making out with a girl slightly younger than her own twenty years of age, dressed up like a Powerpuff girl. I couldn’t tell you what it was, but I was glad for it when she stomped through the hotel lobby, looking like she was trying to be Wrath personified, her expression heavy and dark in what I thought was an adorably cute way, and seemed to lock eyes on me before she stalked over to me and almost growled her name and then asked me if I wanted to hang out together? My momma didn’t raise me to be a fool; I said yes in a heartbeat, trying to affect a bit of nonchalance in my surprise; she later told me that I hadn’t been very successful, my expression readable even through visor and makeup I was wearing.

She was a petite woman, almost short enough to be called a “little person”, but just tall enough not to be. At a lofty 1.3 meters— that’s about 4’ 6”, for those of you who still haven’t evolved to the metric system after all these years— and a gorgeously zaftig 70 or so kilos— again, for the non-metric users, about 160 pounds— a budding basketball player she was not. But her pale, cafe au lait skin tone, soft and smooth, her cherubic face with softly wide pale blue bedroom eyes, her gaze a smoke and sultry one when she let her guard down, hair long but naturally curly, and her tiny hands, all held me captive and I was falling for her already. Lust was a distant voice in the back of my head; what I wanted from her was her love.

To this day, I don’t know what she saw in me; I was almost two feet taller than she was, and I had her by at least 50 kilos, I’m sure. I wasn’t a roly-poly guy, but I wan’t a gym rat, either; I kept in some decent shape with martial arts— a bit of Krav Maga, and some Capoeira as a counterpoint— but I was still quite a geeky twenty-two year old. I didn’t feel like my own average looks and my simple brown eyes and milk chocolate complexion warranted the attentions of a beauty like her. And especially because that chocolate skin was covered with dark metallic silver makeup.

But to my surprise, we didn’t talk about comics and the ComicCon. Well, we did, but that rather quickly derailed into more detailed introductions, and that led us to talking about our general lives to one another. We ended up getting lunch together, and surprisingly, she came back to my hotel room with me when I needed to take a break and be me, rather than ‘Jazz’. No, she didn’t seduce me, nor did she strip and beg me to have my way with her; she did, give me her number, and asked me to keep in touch with her.

From that day, we kept in communication with one another and within a year, we were visiting one another at least once or twice a month, dating. And in a twist from tradition, she was the one who proposed to me; as I’ve said before, my momma didn’t raise me to be a fool; I said yes, and we were married soon after.

We had only recently celebrated our second anniversary together when the asteroid was finally demolished, and like the rest of the world, we breathed a sigh of relief when we were told that the asteroid might still cause devastation, but would no longer destroy the world.