TumbleDweeeb

   In the shadow of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, there lived a superhero unlike any other. The Line Runner wasn’t bound by gravity, physics, or even the very panels that contained him. When villains appeared, he would streak across the Mississippi riverfront as a blur of primary colors, but his true power emerged when he reached the edge of reality. With a knowing smile at the reader, he would place one foot on the white margin and then—impossibly—step completely out of the frame.
   Citizens whispered about the times they’d glimpsed him running along the gutters between story panels, or how he’d suddenly emerge from the space between paragraphs to thwart a crime in the Central West End. The Line Runner existed in a liminal space, both character and co-author of his own adventures. Artists who tried to draw him found their pencils moving of their own accord, sketching a figure that seemed to critique their technique before racing off the drawing board entirely.
   What no one in St. Louis understood was that the Line Runner saw our world too—the coffee cups beside keyboards, the fingerprints on tablet screens, the readers turning pages. He ran not just beyond the boundaries of his fictional universe but occasionally brushed against ours, leaving behind impossible evidence: bookmark ribbons that moved overnight, comic pages where his figure appeared slightly different each reading, and sometimes, just sometimes, readers would swear they felt a gentle breeze as if something had just raced past their shoulder, too fast to see.