BERENSTEIN

Anna Akhmatova, Poem Without A Hero / The Good Place (2015-2019) / Marie Howe, Magdalene: Poems; "Walking Home" / Howl's Moving Castle (2004) / Holly Warburton, Making Amends / Taylor Swift, Mirrorball

          Lark Lennox would do anything for love.

          When she meets Wally West on a random Tuesday at the flower-shop where she works, she thinks it's fate. Wally is funny, honest, cute—he's everything Lark has ever wanted in a guy, and more. And she's his dream girl, who laughs at all his stupid jokes, who gets all his nerdy references. It's your perfect meet cute: a pretty boy, a prettier girl, a rainy day, a lingering glance. . .

          Then, right before her eyes, Wally disappears.

          Before she can even give him her number, he disappears—back into the Speedforce, where reality believes he belongs.

          Reality is wrong. And reality, as it always has been, is Lark's to control. In that instant, she realises the full extent of her powers; she feels the world turn fluid, malleable, changeable in her hands. In that instant, she realises the gift she's been given, the gift she's had since she was a little girl: the power to control reality. To change it.

          To make it her own.

          So she does what she knows she's destined to do—she turns back the clock, reversing the flow of time, and retrieves Wally at the exact moment of his disappearance. She saves him, and what follows is the romance she's always dreamed of, one right out of the romcoms she breathes like air. One that convinces her that saving Wally is worth it, that it'll always be worth it. She wants it, him, them.

          Wally, and his secret identity as the Flash—she wants it. She wants it all.

          And she has it. But in the new world she's made for herself, she fails to notice the omens, the warning signs. The cars that appear on empty roads, swerving to hit Wally just as Lark pulls him out of the way; the eleventh-hour heroism Lark is forced to perform to save Wally from a seemingly endless line-up of villains-of-the-week; the freak accidents that occur again and again, ones that Lark always just manages to prevent, that seem desperate to claim Wally. As if the place he belongs isn't by Lark's side, as she's come to convince herself.