"Please step aside, ma'am," said the airport security guard, not bothering to look at her.

"I have a boarding pass!"  Shirley clawed through her purse.  She always put tickets in the front pocket.  She was meticulous about things like this, because she lived alone and could not count on anyone else to find lost keys or documents.

"Ma'am," said the security guard, "you need to step aside and let other passengers get by."

"I have it somewhere."  But maybe someone had stolen it.  At her age, she had trouble staying aware of her surroundings.

The security guard took her by the shoulders and guided her to one side.  "Ma'am, I don't want to keep asking you to step aside."

By now, she guessed she would miss her flight.  Her husband would be buried alone, lowered into the cold ground without a single mourner.  She was afraid of fading away like that, ignored, just a piece of background furniture.

A large family pushed past her, trailed by several screaming children.  None noticed Shirley.  She'd been ahead of them in line, but she might as well have ceased to exist.

She grabbed the handle of her valise and dragged it to the metal-detector.  "I need to get through."

The security guard blocked her.  She tried to shove past, and her elbow hit the side of the X-ray machine.  Something on the conveyor belt fell over.  She hardly realized what it was until a cold stinging sensation traveled up her arm and spread into the rest of her body.

Her elbow was soaked with a white liquid.  It leaked from a tightly sealed container marked with a biohazard symbol.  The liquid sizzled on whatever it touched. 

She lifted her arm and stared at the soaked patch of her elbow in dread.  She barely realized she was falling.

The security guard caught her.  "You all right, ma'am?"

Her muscles twitched uncontrollably.  Her limbs tingled.  People talked impatiently, as if she was just a piece of luggage on the floor.  The guard was already losing interest.  Nothing she could say or do would matter to him.  Strangers didn't care about her.  Ever since her husband had abandoned her two decades ago, she'd been surrounded by strangers. 

"Why couldn't you have helped me find my boarding pass?" Shirley asked.  She was small, elderly, an obvious picture of vulnerability.

"Uh, I was just trying to . . ." The guard interrupted himself with an oomph sound.  He bent over, retching, as though he'd been punched in the stomach.  His head glistened with sweat. 

Shirley backed away.  The security guard looked very sick all of a sudden.  His body contorted. 

Beneath it, skin and bones slid around like cooked meat. 

His torso elongated, like stretched rubber.  His head drooped on his lengthening neck.  He screamed in agony.

The crowd backed off in one motion, as if with one mind.  Shirley took a couple of steps back, but her valise was nearby, and she didn't want to lose that.

The guard's shoulders began to overlap his uniform.  Clothing and skin ruptured, revealing slimy muscles, oozing blood.  He continued to shriek.  The red horror pulsated for a moment, and then a new folding of skin encased the man.  It was as shiny and white as porcelain. 

He fell to his knees, his legs fusing into one unit.  His arms spread outward in a flattening cross.  His face grew pinched and featureless, and his screams ended as his mouth vanished into a metallic protrusion.

The thing that ended up in the security aisle was an airplane.  No sign of humanity remained.  Only dolls would have been able to ride this jet, however; it was the same size the guard had been.

The few remaining onlookers stared at the mini-airplane in horror.  Some of the people wept.  An old man stared blankly with his hat in his hands.

Shirley didn't understand what had happened, but she knew an opportunity when she saw one.  She snatched her valise and squeezed past the security checkpoint.  No one seemed to notice that she'd gone through security without a boarding pass.

The further into the terminal she walked, the fewer people looked panicked.  Shirley looked for her gate and remembered that she lacked her flight information.

She spotted a harried businessman and blocked his path.  "Pardon me, I'm going to Dallas.  Do you know which gate my flight leaves from?"

The man blew through his mustache in irritation.  "Have you tried looking at the flight monitors over there?"

Shirley glanced at the monitors, but their text was too blurry for her poor vision.  "I can't read them."

The businessman groaned and rippled obscenely. 

Shirley backed away a couple of steps.  She bumped into someone.  Travelers were stopping in their tracks, staring at the businessman, who had begun to mutate.

He squatted and shortened.  His clothes fused and formed a gray shell.  Bones cracked in his legs and arms as they vanished into his body.  If the man had still had a mouth, he might have screamed in pain, but all that remained of his face was his eyes.  They flattened and spread to the size of pancakes.  Life faded from their glassy remains.  Everything about him was becoming squat, square, and gray.

The businessman transformed into a man-sized television monitor.  Departure times glowed across the screen. 

All around Shirley, people stood agape.  Someone collapsed in a dead faint.  A little boy wept into his shocked mother's dress.  An Asian man was cursing softly in a foreign language. 

Shirley had no way to know if the flight information on the man-monitor was accurate, but the text was easy to read.  She noticed a departure for Dallas listed next to Gate 32.

She wended through the terminal, ignoring intercom announcements and all the conversations around her.  For the first time in her life, she was glad to be unremarkable.  A new speculation had entered her head.  What if the biohazard liquid, combined with an electric shock, had given her some sort of superhuman ability? Maybe could channel her frustration or exasperation into power.

Power.

Shirley clenched her vein-knotted around the handle of her valise.  Power was all but impossible for a friendless old lady to obtain.  Attention was one form of power, and so was wealth.  She wielded both whenever she was able to.  But this . . .  this was the sort of power that she couldn't have imagined in her dreams.  No one would ever look at her with disgust or pity again.  Or not for long.

A young stewardess trotted in Shirley's direction, checking her wristwatch.

"Miss?" Shirley called in her plaintive, tremulous voice. 

The stewardess blinked at her.

"Miss, could you tell me where I can buy chocolates?" said Shirley.  "I'd love to buy some truffles."

"Oh."  The stewardess looked flustered.  "I'm sorry, I'm in a hurry." Her shapely legs churned faster. 

She stopped in mid-stride and raised both hands to her face.  She looked like she was going to sneeze.

Her body began to widen.  Her tan skin became darker, and took on a new sheen.  A sweet dark chocolate fragrance filled the air.  The black hair piled atop the stewardess's head dripped into chocolate stripes. 

Shirley moved away faster this time, blending in with the crowd.  She missed the rest of the transformation.  When she looked back, a crowd blocked her view.  People cursed and laughed maniacally, or stared in horrified silence.  The smell of chocolate made Shirley's mouth water.

She continued down the concourse and smiled.

Her next test subjects stood at a McDonald's booth.  Shirley started at the end of the line and asked each person where the nearest restroom might be.  Those who took the time to answer were spared.  If they pointed to a restroom sign, or gave her an honest reply, they lived. 

The people who brushed Shirley off with a casual "I don't know" transformed into gigantic toilets.

By the time she reached the counter, Shirley had abandoned her valise, no longer interested in travel or her belongings.  She laughed so hard that her stomach hurt.  She hadn't truly laughed in years.  Around her, people screamed and cried at the huge porcelain toilets.

"It's up to you!"  Shirley shouted, not caring if anyone heard her or not.  "It's your choice!  Show kindness to an old lady, and you live!  Brush her off, and your fate is sealed!"

She hadn't felt so alive in decades.  She danced down the concourse, unnoticed in the mayhem.  Entire families sprinted past her to see if their loved ones were toilets.  Shocked people wandered past Shirley without seeing her.  The rest overlooked her.  She was just a little old lady, alone and harmless.

The Gate 32 area was empty, since the airport had entered a state of frenzied emergency.  Shirley no longer wanted to mourn her estranged husband at his empty funeral.  She sat down to rest, and to imagine what she might do next.

Her power seemed to rely on the reaction to her questions.  The key to making it work, it seemed, was to get someone to say, "I can't help you," or "I won't help you." If the person made an honest effort, nothing happened.  Why was that? Shirley wondered if her subconscious was in charge of the power.  Her conscious mind didn't seem to be in complete control. 

"Hello."  A nun hobbled towards Shirley, holding out a tin collection cup.  "Will you donate a few dimes to help the poor?"

Shirley protected her purse. 

The nun wasn't so easily deterred.  "One dollar can make a difference in a battered woman's life."

Shirley held the mouth of her purse firmly closed.  If the nun said one more word, she would—

"Shirley!" a man shouted.  "Shirley Knott!"

Most of the time, those syllables had nothing to do with Shirley, but this man was her driver from the limousine company.  He ran towards her, waving a paper.  A boarding pass.

"Hey," he said, panting.  "I tried to page you, but there's something weird going on.  Jeez.  The security guards just let me through."  He handed her the boarding pass.  "You left this behind.  It must have fallen out of your purse."

Shirley snatched the pass.  "You have no idea how much trouble this caused."

The nun shook her collection cup under Shirley's nose.  "Can you spare just a dollar?"

"Or you could give me a tip," said the driver.  "For making the effort of coming back here."

Shirley stared from the nun to the chauffeur.  She needed a way to get rid of them both at once.  "Do I look like I'm made of money?" she asked.

At once, her skin felt prickly, too hot.  The heat became pain.  A thousand stinging cuts appeared on her dry, wrinkled skin.

Shirley howled.  Her screams rose higher, and it was too late to come up with the right answer, the kind answer.  Before consciousness left her forever, she knew exactly what she would turn into.