The Good Fight 4: Homefront

by Ian Thomas Healy

  “She wants us to look at her!” I said in amazement.

  “But did you hear the other half of what you said?” Said Rita. “She thinks of herself like a locket.”

  “Yes!” I said. “Locking herself up hard to keep this perfect picture family safe. Doesn’t she know what she’s doing? It’s just a picture, lady! Your real kids are terrible!” I yelled after her and started laughing. There’s a terrific rush to realizing you’ve been making sense your whole life when you thought that you were crazy. Rita laughed even harder, feeling the same.

  We walked the mall all day. After the first lady, I inhaled a man with grey nose hairs who surprisingly felt springy inside, like a cucumber. And a girl who had a missing tooth and a million rolling, easy dreams, but was tying herself to three or four and trying to ride away. There was a man who felt like he was standing on a very high peak of a still-higher mountain, whose breath inside was trembling from awe. I was afraid of being weird, but when we couldn’t figure out what made him feel so magical, Rita insisted on walking right up to him and asking what made him glow. His eyes went back and forth between the two of us, searching for our motives, before he gave himself up with a happy fuck-it shrug:

  “Yesterday my mother called me Maryann on the phone. Today, she called me Michael. And now I can promise myself that no one who calls me Maryann will be in my life again.”

  Part of me wanted to take Michael out to eat and end our day right there, with everyone happy and seeing new horizons. But truth coming out of its shell is a special high for Rita, and we both felt like gamblers who just hit the jackpot. We jumped up and down and danced around with Michael, then we left him there laughing and waving goodbye and raced ahead to see what mountains were left hiding in the crowd.

  I dove into a hulking giant of a man whose thoughts were all curling and sooty on top, like smoke from a chimney. It carried up in ashy strands from a fiery heart that couldn’t be seen. I told Rita about it and said, “That guy’s either an artist or he’s writing a love-letter.”

  Rita sighed and said, “Well, he thinks he is, anyway.”

  I jumped in her head to see what she meant. The wind of her thinking raked over my words like a thin-tined comb. I would have assumed a truth-teller would be confused by people who lied without knowing it (which is kind of the way most people fantasize). But in her mind I could feel each little knot where real-life cut into the story. I saw the way that, even while mainly believing what he told himself, the tall man kept his fingers in reality, snagging up threads of his making. His lies were a silly kinked thing that spread itself out in her atmosphere as if to filter air. Rita isn’t like me. She didn’t untangle the staleness and try to keep it. The speed of her awareness kept ripping through it until, like asteroids chaffed by gravity, the whole knot caught fire and left her mind in ash.

  “Way stew time,” I blurted, back in my body.

  Rita smirked at the sound of her thoughts in my mouth and tugged me along with the crowd.

  We wandered into a department store and found a man selling vacuum cleaners, who just at that moment was trying to visit the gold-pearl of good feeling he was keeping in his belly. Rita helped me figure out it was the good memory of that morning in bed with his wife. And around the corner, in the lingerie department, a lady with glittery eyebrows brushed me in passing. She was scary inside. Fuzzy in the way a headache can be. Yawning inside her fuzziness and stretching forever was nothing . . . the edges of it sharp and smarting, like a scream.

  People like her are exactly the reason I don’t like to look at the people in a crowd. I jetted instinctively into the safe paper world of my own head. Paper-ball piles made hills that rolled far away into vague shadows. It’s the only way I can look at the world when things outside get scary. And because I have so much practice seeing it . . . because it’s the place that I always come back to . . . it’s more solid and clear to me during these times than things made of brick.

  My desk sits dead-center of the hill-sized paper piles. I sat there under my chair’s big umbrella, watching the storm of memories spill down from the other lady’s mind. I stuck out my hand, grabbed a big paper clod from the sky, and got to work flattening crinkles.

  I have nothing and no one, the big paper said. I’m going to die alone.

  I tapped my chin with my red correcting pen, then wrote “MAYBE” on the top. I fed the flattened sheet into the slit in my desk that funnels all my work into files underneath the crumpled rain. The MAYBE stacks of scary things were getting pretty thick.

  Rita’s voice dropped down from the sky on a paper plane, buzzing like a gnat as it circled my umbrella. Her words on the side were written in bold:

  Let me help.

  I made a half-hearted grab at the airplane, thinking I’d file it away after I unfolded it to see the subtext written in the creases. Her thoughts stayed out of reach, and more of her words buzzed in on paper wings.

  Don’t hide from me, Rahima.

  I ran on crunching wads out to where I kept a certain set of files, punching paper clumps away from my eyes. Rita’s perfect airplanes followed me, their noses sharply pointed. I waited for a box to rise out of the crinkled hill, then yanked out a copy of the words that I wanted and pointed them up at the sky.

  I’m not trying to hide. I’m just looking for answers.

  Rita’s planes kept circling, looking not appeased. I ducked, grabbing a paper rainball where it landed at my ankles. I held it over my head, pointed at words on the surface that read, I want to do this alone.

  Don’t you LIE TO ME!!

  A razor-pointed airplane zipped down from my sky and came shuttling straight at my nose. I gasped, stepping into my body . . . which was walking. My legs had carried me all the way over to the corner with the dressing rooms. My arms clutched an overflowing pile of underwear, and I heard Rita behind me rushing to catch up.

  I kept walking. At the long bench between bras and shoes I dumped all the stuff in my hands. I turned slowly, sitting down. There was a trail of panties I’d dropped leading back to the woman with glittering eyebrows. She stood at the discount bin, sifting through thongs with her back to me.

  Rita marched right up, hands on hips. Her face in the chalky department light was more fierce and pointed than her airplanes in my mind. I didn’t want to cry, but I couldn’t help it. I’m that kind of person. Rita’s eyes didn’t soften or shrink from my face. Her arms didn’t circle me, sorry and soothing. She just said the thing she’d been trying to tell me the whole time I was hiding in my head.

  “You are not alone.”

  “I’m not alone.” I hiccupped once, losing control. Tears and snot poured out and I made blubbering sounds like a kid. Rita still didn’t touch me. She didn’t tell me to hush or offer me her shoulder to bury my face in. But I understood why, and it made me fall in love . . . because, even when it’s loud and ugly and making a big scene at the mall, Rita wouldn’t ask another person to cover up her truth.

  “Have a tissue?” I prompted, for proof that I was right about Rita just not being scared of my feelings. She took my hand with a laugh and led to me to the bathroom, where after I blew my nose we both started laughing too hard to stand up straight and Rita had to run to the toilet and pee.

  “Hey,” I said when she came out. “Let’s visit the pet store!”

  I put on my crowd-blinders to get us up the stairs and all the way to the back side of the east wing, where you could stand in front of the big window display watching kittens pounce on each other’s tails. A striped-gray fuzzball waggled his butt in the air, green eyes fixed on a little blowing tuft of his sister’s long hair. There was no room in his head for anything but the waiting, the wiggling, the watching the thing for just the right moment.

  “Die, ebil moving fingy!!” I screamed at the top of my lungs right when the little cat lunged.

  A lot of people stopped and stared. I bounced from worlds of clattering cards snapping back into order, gasping warm vacuums that wanted to listen, surf
ing high waves coasting over mud bubbles and drinking hot chocolate with wiggling beetles before Rita took my face in her hands, laughing softly. Her frictionless cold filled my mind like a chaser and she put thick arms around me, finally . . . what I’d been hoping for all day.

  “I love you,” I whispered, before I could stop myself.

  “That’s it,” she said, with her lips very close to my ear. “That’s the whole, entire truth.”

  -~o~-

  Shielding C is using the History degree given her by Westfield State University for nefarious purposes. Her blogging includes poetry. Her indie books on Amazon include Glow, which is about time-travel, and Consider An Abortion - which is not. Her activism is pro-sex-worker, anti-Trump, and frequently uses the hashtag #ImasurvivorAnd. Follow Shielding C on twitter and she just might follow back. Challenge her on chess.com and she just might make you cry. Visit her blog, author page, or Patreon and she’ll love you forever. You can find more of Rahima, Rita, and other superheroes on Shielding’s blog, and probably eventually in a superhero collection, Superhurt.

  Blog: https://amodestbloggist.com/

  Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/Shielding-C/e/B00Y9C930I

  Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=9380599

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  Zephyr: Windsong

  Warren Hately

  I’ve got Twilight and Shade on the posse I’m assembling to lynch Annie Black’s killer.

  And I’ve got steely resolve in spades, but at the same time, the acknowledgment lurks in the back of my brain that this clear, focused and straight-forward aim of mine also lets me push a whole bunch of other messy personal shit into the background for now.

  Damned straight.

  Settling in near the Flyaway’s bar with Shift, Twilight and Shade as two couples pretty much kills the celebratory vibe of the occasion. It’s also hard to get a word in edgewise for all the morons who keep throwing themselves our way, Shade signing autographs, Scott Baio showing a tattoo of my thunderbolt zee wrinkling on his bicep, and agentless young actresses offering to buy me a drink in their huskiest, most femme fatale tones and falling flat once Gretchen entwines her fingers through mine.

  I don’t even know we’re doing it and then we’re out of there, Shift leading me out onto the dancefloor with no idea of what I’m going to do beneath the caterwauling of rainforest monkeys slaughtered to a machine-gun beat except find any excuse to scram. But Gretchen’s girlfriendly hand holds me fast. We kiss under the epileptic lights, flesh packed in around us like its ready for shipping, my anonymous hands squeezing her butt . . . and that’s also how I set her aside so I can stride off towards Mastodon flirting with a woman in a suit and a dude in a dress I don’t recognize as the Canadian prime minister and her husband.

  “Zephyr,” Mastodon bellows at me and tries not to focus on Shift standing abandoned in the middle distance.

  I tug my forelock to the dignitaries and then ditch on them too, letting the ‘Don fall into my slipstream as I wend my way back around the back of the cavernous club hoping to get to the other, less densely-populated end of its enormously long bar, unfortunately close to a hive of speaker stacks bombarding us with vibrations and making conversation nearly incomprehensible.

  Mastodon gives me a look like someone’s fucked his puppy.

  “What’s going on, ‘Don?” I jump up to yell in his ear a couple of times.

  Fighting the “grandfather of the super scene” tag these days, the ‘Don’s in good shape despite a little more flab and an unchecked look to his lank gray locks. The tusks jutting out either side of his broad collar keep getting in my line of sight and I’m briefly irritated to think how easy it’d be to lose an eye, especially each time he leans down my way because of the height differential to tell me “everything’s okay.”

  Mastodon’s channeling his best sullen schoolboy. I’m not having any of it.

  “Hey, forget whatever you think might be bad blood between us. We’re good, ‘Don,” I say. “Relax, man.”

  “Sorry Zephyr,” he says. “Truth is, I feel pretty bad about ghosting you for a while there.”

  “Shoe’s on the other fucking foot now, huh?”

  I only mean it as a quip, but as always, jokes reveal our truest intent. Still, my barb alone doesn’t explain Mastodon’s hangdog look.

  “I thought you’d be in your element here,” I say to him, again repeating it two or three times.

  I end up yelling “Plenty of pussy!” like a complete rectum, trying to make my point without the subtlety the acoustics forbid. Mastodon gets my point and shrugs and leans back into me.

  “I wasn’t much help to you against the Doomsday Man,” he says.

  “Not many of you were,” I say with a shrug. “We all have our days.”

  “Not me, lately.”

  “What, you too? Jesus, man, what gives?”

  “It’s just money, man,” he says. “I’m sixty years old and I don’t have shit to show for all of this. I live in a fucking trailer, man.”

  “It’s a secret defunct submarine sea base buried in the river,” I say to him. “It’s pretty cool.”

  “It’s a while since you’ve been there.”

  I’m not sure what to make of this statement, all too easily imagining how it wouldn’t take more than missing the trash a few times for Mastodon’s digs to turn hellishly unhygienic. The look in his drug-fucked eyes says it all.

  “The rest of you went on and made something of yourselves . . .”

  “‘Don, how bad is it?”

  “What, Zephyr? I . . .”

  “Dude, you are the worst at this,” I say. “How much do you owe?”

  The big dude drops his eyes.

  “Ninety kay,” he says. “A hundred’s what I really need, though.”

  “Easy.”

  “What?”

  “Serious,” I say. “Just go to that Blomquist guy at StarScene and spill your guts on how much you hate me and how . . . how . . . how the city’s only in the state it’s in because of people like me. Make it an exclusive. Have him call me. I’ll say a few choice words. Then ka-ching, payday.”

  “I don’t want to sell you down the river like that, Zeph.”

  “Pfft,” I say. “It’s StarScene.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah brother, have one on me.”

  “Fucking hell, Zephyr,” he says. “You’re the best.”

  Yes I am.

  He comes at me with the hug so fast I nearly lose that fucking eye, but for some reason we’re both laughing like clowns on LSD. The music seems to ratchet up a notch like a natural punctuation mark.

  * * *

  “I’m still wondering if that mask ever comes off,” a pretty voice calls from behind.

  I unwrap myself from Mastodon’s embrace to see Windsong no longer looking so much like a female replica of me in my leather costume, and more like just my daughter, her look matured during the past two years . . . her look, maybe, but not her height.

  Given our environs, I don’t actually know if this is the costume she actually wears these days or if it’s just her outfit for the event. The rules are different for lady supers, as we used to call ‘em. Tessa wears a crisp, nearly military-looking high-collared cape over an armored, storm-colored tunic, steel bracers, black leather leggings and boots. Her insignia’s just a faint trace on her chest, more like a brand than a symbol.

  The same could be said of her face.

  I pat Mastodon on his taller shoulder and dismiss him and take a couple of steps to join Tessa as the ‘Don says his hellos and then fuckoffskis so I can give my daughter a long hug far more powerful than she either wants or expects. In the end Windsong pushes me off, more like I’m her creepy uncle than her dad, shooting a bemused look at my sudden sentimentality with no idea about half the things I’ve so recently travailed.

  “Hey,” she says. “It’s not like I was gonna miss the Battle of the Century.”

  “I wasn’t even
thinking about that,” I tell her. “But funny you mention it.”

  The images from just days before flash in front of me like an indie filmmaker’s first effort, Tessa standing under the club’s strobing lights knowing she broke her pledge to stay away from the rampage I was caught in between my two erstwhile ex “fathers” that nearly killed us all, the battle exhuming half of Arlington cemetery before the day was done.

  “That was the one time I really, really thought you meant it when you promised me.”

  “Hey, that’s my line,” Tessa says.

  She adopts the pose of an ever-suffering daughter, knowing it plays so well. The only thing I give into this time is my scowl.

  “No fair.”

  And I surprise her by hauling her back into my arms, taking a bong hit off the fragrance of my daughter’s hair as charged static startles a few of the doofuses dancing around us as my daughter also jumps back with a shocked and delighted laugh.

  “What the eff, dad?” she says and can’t help beaming. “What’s got into you?”

  “I think there were a few long stretches there where I wasn’t sure I was gonna make it back to this point,” I say.

  Tessa pays me the dignity of acknowledging the confession for what it is.

  “Seeing that at the cemetery, the Preacherman take on the Doomsday Man?” she says. “That was the scariest thing I’ve seen in my life.”

  I nod, a Buddhist meditation on her offering.

  “Can you understand the fear I sometimes have for you then, knowing shit like that’s out there ready to catch you unaware?”

  “Dad, please,” she says and waves me off. “Not again.”

  I grunt, too happy in her company to argue or even wonder why this has to be the locale for our reunion especially when we can barely hear each other.

  She leans back into me.

  “Guess what?” she yells.

  There’s a familiarity to her infectious grin, a childhood trope from every time she had good news, hair still in pigtails, teeth missing.