The Astonishingly Unastonishing Life of Simon Quibble

Simon Quibble’s mind is not a haunted house. It is the aftermath of a haunting—the hollow where something vast once lived, now reduced to the weight of its own absence. He does not fear monsters under his bed because he knows the real horror is the unshakable certainty that he is, irrevocably, ordinary. His life is not a story abandoned mid-filming; it is the discarded first draft of a story no one will ever read.

He waits, of course. All heroes-in-waiting do. But Simon’s waiting is not patient. It is the quiet, gnawing kind—the kind that erodes. He practices roundhouse kicks in the backyard, scuffing his Puma Clydes in the dirt, spinning, leaping, falling. He recites The 36th Chamber of Shaolin like holy writ, mouthing the words with the quiet fervor of a boy who believes language alone can conjure transformation. He knows, in the way children know impossible things, that the Glow will come for him—not as a lightning strike or a spider’s bite, but as a slow unfurling, like the moment …