by Sevan Paris
After three minutes of sweating and grunting, the bag was eventually on the far side of the alley. Taking a deep breath, I leaned over to swing the monstrosity into the dumpster, only to see a line of coffee grinds trailing me from the door. With a soul-crushing dread, I tilted the garbage bag to look underneath.
I caught the glimpse of a foot-long split right before it suddenly doubled in size and—like the the guts of a lightsabered tauntaun—the black bag unleashed its tightly packed garbage. Muddy grinds, half-eaten food, and dark juice gushed across my pants, shoes, and the concrete.
“Seriously?” I flung away the bag. It landed at the foot of the dumpster, heaving more of its insides onto the ground. Then I just stood there—sweating in my jelly-bean stained shirt and garbage stained pants—and stared at the door with a curled lip.
It’s moments like that when I couldn’t help but define my life not by what I did well, but by what I sucked at. And since I’d spent the past hour sucking at everything I did, it didn’t really feel like I had much to lose by simply walking home right then.
Who was I going to disappoint? Jessica? She was disappointed in me from the moment we met. Mom? She was indifferent to me getting a job anyway. That just left me disappointing myself. And considering that was something I was doing already …
I looked over my shoulder, towards the alley’s exit. Towards home and clean pants. And took one, shame-ridden step.
Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw … him.
Heart racing, I spun around, squinting into the sky at the one Superhero from which all other Superheroes must be judged—Liberty. Thinking about how excited I was to see him, about how big the goofy grin on my face must have been … it makes me want to punch myself stupid.
He flew right over me, just the hint of a blur tugging at his red cape. His posture rigid, powerful arms stretched in front of him, jaw set in firm determination. I ran to the mouth of the alley, barely catching one more fleeting glimpse of the World’s Greatest Hero before he disappeared around the edge of a nearby building, on his way to do the things that only people like him can do.
I always wanted to be a Superhero, so much so that I’d memorized the HEROES oath. I wanted to feel what they felt when they saved people from a burning building. I wanted to see Earth from the moon; I wanted to meet the Princess of Atlantis, I wanted to meet other heroes and talk to them the way BFF’s talk. I wanted to feel, not just important, but one of the most important.
My grin slowly faded …
There were quite a few ways to get powers: some lab experiment gone crazy, getting a little too close to an alien artifact, being bombarded with radiation … but the chances of that stuff happening were slim. The best shot anybody had was some sort of natural mutation. But since Naturals usually manifested their powers at puberty, my eighteen-year-old self was out of luck. I was never going to be a Super, which meant I would never be a Superhero.
I wanted to be important all right. But if my experience on the first day of my first job was any indication, I was rapidly on my way to an unimportant life. The garbage surrounding my feet would become a symbol for the life I would always have. And my fleeting glimpse of Liberty, the life I would always want.
I turned back around, facing the dumpster, ready to give a silent goodbye to both it and Jessica. Ready to wallow in my own self-pity at home, in the nice warm glow of an Xbox.
When a screaming blue cloud of energy rushed out of the garbage and hit me right in the face.
CHAPTER TWO
“Gabe?” A far away voice said.
I opened my eyes one at a time, staring up at an impatient face: “Jessica? I … what happened?”
“You tell me—I just found you here.”
The rest of the world spiraled in. I was still in the alley, lying in a grimy mixture of coffee grinds and garbage juice. I rose and went regid, stopped by a searing pain sprouting in the base of my skull.
“Woah, easy.” She eased a hand under my shoulder and a white rag under my head. “Looks like you slid on some garbage and busted your head on the pavement.” She looked at the rag and her shoulders relaxed a little. “No blood though.”
I brought my knees under me and slowly stood, putting a hand on her shoulder.
“You okay? You need an ambulance?”
“I—no, I just need a minute …” I looked at the dumpster, thinking about the blue cloud. My skin tingled, maybe from excitement, maybe from … something else. When you grew up in the city of Prose, you knew a potential Superhero origin when you saw one.
“Are you—” Jessica squinted at me—“are you grinning?”
I cleared my throat and backed away from her, feeling a little better with each step. “You said you found me like this? By myself?”
Jessica nodded. “Yeah. Well, you and Petey here.” With a flick of the rag, she gestured at my feet.
I looked down: A dachshund sat on its haunches to my right, patiently, as if waiting for something. “Petey?” The dog took two steps towards me, slightly wagging its tail.
“The local dumpster diver. You trip over him?”
“I don’t—I don’t think so. I didn’t even see him.”
Jessica shook her head a little and bent over, filling her hands full of used coffee filters and empty soda cans. “Well, if you did trip over him, seems like you wouldn’t have seen him.”
“No,” I bent over beside her, picking up a half-empty water bottle. “I’ll—it’s my mess. I’ll get it. You’ve got customers.”
Jessica hesitated for a moment, then flung her garbage into the dumpster. “Yeah, I do. But you know what else I got? A lawyer. And I’m pretty sure he’ll say letting you stay on the clock would be the baddest of bad ideas. Just leave it and go home. I’ll deal with it later.” She turned away, opening the door.
After Jessica had just displayed an act of kindness that seemed to contradict the hard-ass I’d met in her office, I quickly decided that I couldn’t just walk out on her. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I was still going to quit. But I thought it better to at least to tell her that I was quitting. I raised my hand. “Jessica—”
She stopped in the entrance, the open door hiding the dumpster from her.
Hiding the floating dumpster from her.
A glowing blue field of energy surrounded the dumpster, the same shade of blue as the cloud that flew at my face earlier.
Jessica jabbed a finger at me. “Look, don’t give me any lip, Garrison. Just—just go home. Let me worry about today, and we’ll figure out the rest later. I’ll keep your job in the meantime. Okay?”
“Uh, yeah,” I said, hand still raised. “Okay. That sounds—that sounds good.”
She looked at my raised hand, mouth moved as if to say something, and then just shook her head and shut the door behind her.
Meanwhile, the dumpster kept hovering. I slowly moved my hand to the right.
The dumpster moved to the right.
It followed me to the left as well. I gently lowered my palm and the dumpster—which weighed who knew how much—softly touched down to the concrete, barely making a creak.
“Yeah,” I said quietly, grinning ear to ear. “Let’s figure the rest of it out.”
***
I shut my bedroom door and leaned on it. “Superpowers …”
Petey, having just followed me home, jumped onto my bed and cocked his head at me.
“I have freaking Superpowers. Which means I can be a freaking Superhero. Freaking finally …”
Petey barked twice.
There should have been any number of thoughts running through my head. Like where did that blue cloud come from? What were my actual powers? What were their limits? Should I register the powers with the government now or wait until I have a better idea of what’s going on?
But I wanted powers for so long … now that I had them, I didn’t want to think about the why’s or the how-to’s. I wanted to jump straight from Super-zero to Superhero. I started putting together a costume
, still not thinking—not even considering—any of the secret origin or responsibility crap that came with it.
So freaking stupid.
For someone who’d fantasized so much about becoming a Superhero, all of my attempts at putting together a costume were surprisingly pathetic. First, I took an ACE bandage from the bathroom drawer and wrapped it around my head, leaving only my eyes exposed. I put on a dark blue hoodie and then looked in the full length mirror next to my ScarJo poster.
I held up my fists, like I was ready to punch crime right in the teeth. “The Bandaged Avenger!”
I lowered my hands, shoulders sagging. “No, wait, that doesn’t sound right.” I raised my fists again. “The Levitating Mummy!” I held the pose for a few ticks of the Spider-Man clock on my bedroom wall … “Ah, that’s lame.” I yanked the tangled bandage from my face. The hoodie quickly joined it next to the pillow on my bed.
The pillow …
I yanked off the pillow case and grabbed some scissors from the Star Wars mug on my desk. After clipping two eyeholes, I pulled the pillow case over my hand, and turned to face the mirror again. “And now, Evil Doers, get ready for …” I waved my hand in front of my face.
I had cut the eye-holes too far apart. I couldn’t see a damn thing.
It took three more pillow cases from the dresser before I had the eye-holes where they needed to be. I tied the bottom of the pillow case back behind my neck and put the hoodie back on. My hands went to my hips, my chest swelled like Liberty’s, and I announced, “The Trench Coat Ghost!”
Petey lowered his head and whined.
I sighed. “Okay, you’re right.” The pillow joined the other three in the garbage. I paced back and forth for a bit. “But what—” I snapped my fingers—“I got it.”
Fifteen minutes later, I stood in front of the mirror—domino mask that had been a random birthday gift from a few years ago pressed firmly to my face; one of Mom’s thin, black trench coats tightly cinched around my waist (you couldn’t tell it was a woman’s coat, not really); fists clinched inside black Isotoners, a black ball cap pulled low on my head … I grinned and slowly nodded. “And now, Evil Doers Everywhere, prepare for the unfettered might of … of … Unfettered Might!”
Oh, this is utterly ridiculous.
I chirped out a scream and fell backwards over the bed.
***
Pink laughs, floating back and forth over me in Casa’s kitchen. “Seriously?” she says. “You never—never ever—thought of a name?”
“Hey,” I point my butter knife at her, trying to keep the grin off my face. “In my defense, a name would have depended on what powers I had.”
“Not according to what you just told me—Mr. Unfettered Might!” She curls her lip and holds up her fists.
“Shut-up,” I say through a laugh.
“Well, what about M’s name. It came, like, prepackaged or whatever?”
“Oh, no. He was firmly against the idea of a name.” I grab two slices of bread and toss them on the countertop. “He sees it as a primitive concept, only needed by ‘poorly developed races.’ But I convinced him that I had to call him something.”
“Why a letter? Why THAT letter?”
“Um, it was short for … mighty, magnificent, and … did I say mighty?”
I recognize that pitiful tone … you’re lying.
Pink crinkles her transparent nose.
I quickly open the fridge and duck in to hide my face.
“Seriously?” Pink sticks her head into the fridge, from the side, so that I’m eye-to-eye with her. “I don’t buy that.”
Neither do I. Not any longer anyway. What is the real reason, Gabe?
I hurriedly reach through Pink’s face and grab some grape jelly. Condiment bottles inside the fridge jingle after I shut the door. The real reason (and the one that I never shared with M) was because “M” was short for monkey, as in the monkey always on my back.
“M ultimately seemed as good as anything.” I put the jelly on the counter, next to the knife.
Pink floated up next to me and crossed her arms. “Uh-huh. What do you think, M?”
I think that I certainly deserve to know the truth and … wait—that nitwit does realize that she can’t hear my response, right?
I clear my throat. “Anyway—back to the Superhero name thing—that’s what made M decide to … announce his presence.”
Something which I’m still unsure was wise.
“I don’t get it,” Pink says. “He was just going to what … go on living the quiet life inside your noggin?”
I open the jar and scoop out a knife full of jelly. “He thinks he could have.”
Oh, I KNOW that I could have.
“Why?”
“M wasn’t sure how I—or how anybody—would take it. Worst case scenario, I could have exposed him. To HEROES or somebody else that may have guinea pigged him. Or found a way to hand him over to those Council guys since they were the ones that tried to kill him in the first place.”
“When they attacked him,” Pink says, “scattered him to the wind or whatever, why didn’t they know to finish the job?”
“They thought they’d finished the job. But M discovered that bonding to a corporeal life form would keep his consciousness together. And help him hide. That’s why he bonded with Petey and why he bonded with me. But I had to accept him for it all to work. My mind, my soul, however you wanna look at it, would just force him out otherwise. He explained all this to me. And I agreed to give him a place to hide.”
Pink grins. “If he agreed to help you play Superhero. To hide in plain site.”
I nod, spreading out another blob of jelly onto the bread.
“That’s hardcore weirdness,” Pink said lowly, “even for somebody that’s used to the usual weirdness of Superhero life. How’d you handle it?”
“Could have been better.”
He expelled the contents of his stomach in the nearest waste receptacle.
I clear my throat again. “But I got through it.”
“What did he say that time?”
“What—?”
“Right then,” Pink says, “M said something to you. What was it?”
“How did you know?”
“You cleared your throat. Another tell.”
“Huh. He says that I didn’t handle it that well.”
“Who would? The thought of somebody so different than you, sharing your body like that …”
I truly hope she realizes the irony here.
“Wait,” Pink floats closer. “If M’s an alien, how could he ‘say’ anything in our language? At least right away?”
I wouldn’t go so far as to call your vague utterances a language. More like the barking of a Delphian seal, really.
I lick a dab of jelly off my thumb and open the cabinet door. “He absorbed it from my mind somehow during the bonding process.”
“You guys are, like, telepathic with each other?” she says.
“No. God no. There’s not a word for how awful that would be. He chooses what I hear from him and what I don’t. And he doesn’t hear anything from me unless I say it out loud.”
Pink considers it for a moment. “Sounds a little too easy.”
“Oh, it wasn’t. Some things tripped him up. Actually some things still trip him up. It was—is—like he knows the words but doesn’t have enough context to understand some of their meanings.”
It’s because there are entirely too many meanings!
“Since he didn’t have to sleep, leaving the radio and TV on a night, helped him get caught up a little bit. He also used the next few days to figure out what powers he had left after The Council defeated him.”
“How do they work exactly? The powers.”
Simple: Math.
“M uses that Ramma Radiation I told you about to access something he calls The Void.”
“Which is …?”
I hesitate, trying to find the best way to phrase it.
The Void is where
existence began and it is where it will end. Everything here has more of itself there. It is a realm of absolute power that cannot be seen, but only sensed. Knowing how to manipulate The Void is to know how to manipulate matter, time, and space itself.
I actually think about relaying everything M said but settle with, “There is a lot of really important stuff there.”
Why do I even bother?
I open another cabinet door. “Casa have any peanut butter?”
“On top of the fridge. This Void stuff, this is how he was so powerful before? How he created all the Supers here?”
“And it’s why The Council—his own race—tried to kill him.”
Her mouth moves like she wants to say something.
“It’s a lot to take in, I know.”
“…. Can you access it too? Control stuff?”
“On accident, like with the dumpster. But it’s hard to control. I asked M to shut me off from it to keep anything bad from happening.” I spot the peanut butter on top of the fridge and reach up. “There was one power, however, that I suddenly found out I had access to whether I wanted it or not.”
***
Mrs. Tonkleson’s orange tabby meowed at me from the top branch of the tree in front of my house. I put my hands on my hips and looked back.
Gabe, I bring the power of The Void itself to you, and you want to use it to rescue putty-tats?
“No, I want to use it to rescue people, Superhero style. But before we do that, I want to make sure we have a handle on these powers.”
Superhero … the very idea is ridiculous.
“Well, if you want this symbosis—
SymBIOSIS.
“IF you want this whatever to happen, you’d better get used to the ridiculous.” The cat, I think it’s name was Fluffy, meowed even louder. “Okay, so what do you need me to do?”
Stand still for a moment.
I waited and waited. And waited. Then looked at my watch.
Is your understanding of this limited language so rudimentary that you don’t know what ‘stand still’ means?
“Well, this is taking forever!” I whispered. A car drove by, the next road over. “We need to hurry if we’re going to try this before everybody on the street comes home from work or whatever. We don’t want to be seen doing Superhero-y things, remember?”
