Superheroes

by Margaret Ronald

  “Why not you?”

  He sighs. “I’m not sure … ” He stops. Her face is bone white.

  He has to stop failing the people he loves.

  He takes a deep breath. “Honey, if you want me to train you, I will. I would be proud to. But … ”

  Before entering the complex—before they had been interrupted—he’d had a thought.

  “But you might deserve more.”

  Some of the fear fades from her eyes, replaced by uncertainty.

  “I’ve been making a lot of mistakes lately,” he says, finally approaching the truth. “I don’t want to make any more mistakes with you.”

  She looks away. He follows her gaze up to the moon.

  “I … I overheard you,” she says softly, looking into the sky. “You and Mom. Fighting.”

  “When?”

  Her lips twitch. She looks at him. Right in the eye.

  “Right.” He sighs. “Too many times.”

  “Did you … ? I mean … ” She looks away.

  And so his failures have come to this. She’s known everything from the start. She’s too quick, too much like her mother. She’s heard them fight.

  And so there is really only one question left to ask.

  “Did you really do what she says you did?”

  And so.

  He remembers standing in his kitchen, earlier that night. He remembers the baby crying in his wife’s arms. He remembers the burp-stain on Jean’s shoulder and the anger in her eyes.

  “You can’t keep holding the baby over my head,” he says. “It isn’t fair to Michael. It isn’t fair to the girls.”

  The baby is crying. His wife’s eyes flash. She opens her mouth to speak.

  “Maybe you should have thought of that before you poked a hole in the condom.”

  The baby continues to cry.

  “Jean, you know I didn’t … ” He stops.

  A silence, save for the baby, crying. His wife’s face is set and hard.

  “All right,” he says softly. He looks down at a concert ticket, sitting on the kitchen table. “All right. I’ll go find Mel.”

  He stops at the front door. Looks back at his wife. “I’m sorry I was late.”

  Her expression changes, but he is already turning back, his feet out the door. It shuts behind him.

  “Did you really do what she says you did?” his daughter whispers, looking away into the night.

  How many times? How many times in the last year have they had that same fight? How many times had she hurled that same accusation at him like a spear? How many times, when they thought the children weren’t home?

  He closes his eyes. A man should not have to have this conversation with his fifteen-year-old daughter.

  Then again, he thinks, opening his eyes, a man should not put himself in a position where he has to have it.

  “No,” he says, and she looks back at him. “Not exactly. Although, I can understand why she accuses me of doing … what she says I did.”

  His daughter, holding herself still as if she might dissolve, waits.

  He takes a deep breath. Exhales. Says what is true.

  “I didn’t poke a hole in the condom. Not deliberately. But I did find the hole, in the bathroom. After. Your mother is allergic to the pill. Condoms are the only form of birth-control we use.” A fifteen-year-old girl should not have to hear this from her father. He doesn’t stop. “There had been a couple of similar instances in the past. I always told her. In time. In time to use the morning-after pill.”

  His daughter’s face is still in the moonlight.

  “This time I didn’t tell her. Not until we found out she was pregnant. Not until then.”

  A moment, then his daughter’s face twists in the moonlight. “Jesus, Dad,” she whispers. “That’s … ” Her voice catches, struggling to find the right word.

  “Wrong?”

  “It’s worse than that!” she screams, her fists clenched. “You didn’t give her a choice. You didn’t even … ”

  “I know.”

  “Why? Why would you do that?”

  He remembers standing in the bathroom, staring at the condom in his hands. Standing still, as still as his daughter has become now. The condom falling into the bowl, the weight of the toilet’s flush lever, the condom spinning away …

  He remembers standing in front of a train, sometime before …

  He opens his mouth to speak.

  “Mom said it was because you wanted a son.”

  “Oh, god.” The words escape as if he were deflating. “Honey, I—”

  A wet, rushing sound.

  Father and daughter turn to see a wall of water, lights flickering beneath its surface, rising into the night. It reaches up to the moon.

  “YOU SHOULD HAVE DESTROYED ME WHEN YOU HAD THE CHANCE, KIRBY WALKER AND MELISSA WALKER. NOW … ”

  “Now … ” His daughter’s skin begins to ripple.

  “No.”

  It is enough, he thinks.

  “No,” he says again. His voice has gone cold.

  It is enough.

  He rises into the sky. Gathers the energy of the world so quickly that, if he’s not careful, he might seriously damage the planet.

  Two years ago, a man died here. A week later, Kirby wept in the rain. A few months later, there was a train …

  He reaches down from the sky with his power and rips every molecule of the creature below him from the skin of the earth.

  Maybe you should have thought of that before you poked a hole …

  He rises until it becomes difficult to breathe. Remains at that height, even as he continues to propel the water higher, as high as he can without permanently altering the world’s magnetic field. In seconds, it becomes a star, crowning an electro-magnetic spike glittering into orbit.

  Mom said it was because you wanted …

  “I was having … ” he spits at the star, his voice cold, his skin crackling with failure and pain and rage, “ … a conversation with my daughter.”

  It is enough.

  One hundred and thirty-seven kilometers above the surface of the planet, Kirby Walker begins to strip Top2 down to its atoms and pull them apart.

  One by one.

  It takes a long time. For the next twenty minutes, most of the Western Hemisphere is treated to the greatest light show in the past sixty-five million years. He shields the world from each electro-magnetic pulse. Thirty seconds after he begins, Iridium shows up. Kirby politely asks her to do what she can about the radiation. She takes one look at his face and decides not to ask any questions.

  Twenty-one minutes later, he returns to the earth. Lands near the crumbling remains of abandoned concrete silos. Faces his daughter.

  “Jesus Christ, Dad.” Her eyes are wide.

  “I got tired of being interrupted.” The words are glib, but his hands won’t stop shaking.

  He collapses onto a pile of rubble. He can not remember ever feeling so drained.

  “Melissa,” he says, staring at the moonlit brick at his feet, “your father has done a great many stupid things in the last few years. There are a variety of reasons why. None of them are good enough. I have given your mother cause to be more angry with me than I could have possibly imagined. As you said, what I did to her was wrong. Worse than that.

  “But I love you and your sister and your brother so very, very much.” His head comes up. He looks into his daughter’s eyes. “And if I ever did anything to give you cause to doubt that … then that is the worst thing that I have done.”

  A gleaming in his daughter’s eyes that has nothing to do with the power she holds.

  “Are you and Mom going to stay together?”

  He looks away and exhales sharply. Looks back.

  She remains silent, eyes gleaming.

  He considers shielding her from the truth, wondering if it would spare her any pain. Realizes that it hasn’t up to now.

  “I don’t know,” he says finally. “I think … I think that if not fo
r you and Rebecca and Michael … I think that she probably would have already left. She may still.”

  He looks up at the moon. He had been married there. A long time ago.

  And yet …

  “And yet … ” he says, remembering the final look on his wife’s face. “And yet, your mother is one of the most generous, forgiving people I know.” A small smile. “She forgave her sister.”

  “Who’s her sister?”

  “Shockwave.”

  “Shockwave? Didn’t she try to kill you once?”

  “She did more than that.”

  He remembers cradling his infant daughter in his arms as Archeology Park explodes around him. The look on his wife’s face when she arrives, a look he won’t see again until an autumn morning nearly fourteen years later, two days after an appointment with her doctor.

  “And she forgave her?”

  “Hmm?” He blinks, finds his daughter looking at him. He had been staring at rubble.

  “Yes,” he says softly. “It took seven years … but she forgave her.”

  A wry smile crosses his daughter’s face. “Seven years, huh. And you’re on … what, like one?”

  He can’t help it. He laughs.

  “I think it’s eighteen months if you include the pregnancy.”

  “Christ.” She shakes her head. “I’ll be in college.”

  “With any luck.”

  “I’ll bet we’re the only superhero family that hates each other.”

  “I wouldn’t say that.” He glances at the sky. “You saw what happened here tonight. Laptop created Top2.”

  It suddenly occurs to him that, less than ten minutes ago, he may have destroyed Laptop’s creation. On his own.

  Kirby’s eyes go wide as he stares at the empty sky. Three years ago, Champion had thrown Top2 into a black hole. The machine had survived that. How the hell … ?

  “Dad?”

  His daughter’s head is cocked to one side.

  “Right.” He glances again at the sky then shakes his head. “Top2 called Laptop its father. And it considered Device its grandfather.”

  He lets her figure it out. “So Device was Laptop’s dad?”

  He nods.

  “Wow,” she whispers. “So the first superhero’s kid became a super-villain.” She’s still for a moment, and then her face twists in anguish.

  “He must have hated his father.”

  Again, Kirby thinks of the funeral and Laptop weeping in the rain. “It’s a little more complicated than that.” He looks at his daughter. “It always gets more complicated.”

  He doesn’t want to say what he has to say next, he knows it isn’t fair, but …

  “Mel … what we talked about tonight. About Michael. Honey, you can’t ever tell … I mean, with your brother, you can’t use—”

  “Not even if I wanted to kill him.” Her face is stone white by the light of the moon. “Not even if I wanted him dead.”

  There’s a long silence.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay, I guess you had to say it.”

  He desperately wants to say the right thing right now. He wants …

  Suddenly, his daughter toes the ground and blushes in the moonlight. “I’m sorry I attacked you earlier on.”

  He assumes she’s talking about when she left the house. “It’s all right,” he says quickly. “You had reason to be mad with me. We all say—”

  “Not that.” She laughs. A small little laugh. “I mean the puddles.”

  It takes him a second. He isn’t as quick as she is. Then, suddenly, he remembers: stepping off the curb and plunging into ice water.

  She laughs the little laugh. Looks up through her hair. “I was kind of mad.”

  He pictures himself, one of the most powerful people on the planet, tripping face first into a pool of water.

  Suddenly, they can’t stop laughing.

  It lasts a long time. Father and daughter, doubled over in the moonlight and the rubble. Somewhere along the way for Kirby Walker, it turns into another sigh.

  He looks down at his daughter. The quiet light of his heart.

  “Are we … are we okay?”

  He sees her hesitate. She’s making the same choice he made earlier. On whether or not to shield him from the truth. These are the choices he has forced his fifteen-year-old daughter to make.

  Finally, she says: “I don’t know.”

  He nods. “That’s fair. More than fair.” A pause. “I am sorry, Mel. And I do love you.”

  “I love you too.” Her face is a patchwork of shadows and light.

  He reaches into his costume. Pulls out a ticket to a rock concert.

  “I’ve still got this,” he says, fingering the ticket. “It’s, uh … it’s late, but maybe we could catch the last set. Or … if you want, you could … you could go by yourself … ”

  She’s standing ten feet away, on the crumbled remains of an abandoned silo. Her arms are once again wrapped around her torso as if she were bitterly cold.

  “I think I’d just like to go home.” She looks at her father. “Can we do that?”

  And then his daughter, who tonight has proven to be one of the most powerful entities on the planet, bursts into tears.

  He’s at her side in a heartbeat.

  “It’s okay,” he says, finally lying. “It’s okay.”

  He holds her until the shaking stops, then gently cups a hand under her chin. “We can go home. It’s okay.”

  She sniffles, once, and smiles. A wry, embarrassed little smile.

  He kisses her gently on her brow. Sighs.

  “Come on.” He and his daughter begin to pick their way over rubble. He glances a final time at the moon.

  “Your mother will be waiting.”

  THE STRANGE DESSERTS OF PROFESSOR NATALIE DOOM

  KAT BEYER

  When I was little, I had the run of the lab. Sometimes I got into trouble.

  Once, I used Papa’s prototype tissue-transfer device to attach six extra arms to my left leg. I first tried just one arm, turning on the machine and letting it warm up, lifting the slimy limb out of its growing tank with a pair of tongs just as I had seen Papa do, placing it in one pair of robotic hands and letting another pair take hold of my leg, and then pressing the blue button that I could barely reach. The grafting solution stung a little bit, but the arm attached with such a satisfying plop-pop! noise that I just couldn’t stop. I’m sure I would have started on my right leg if Papa hadn’t come back from his cigarette break just then. I don’t think he worried about me in the least, though he didn’t stop shouting at me the whole time he was removing the arms—he kept saying, “Do you have any idea, Natalie, how long those take to grow?” And, “You’ve cost me at least two weeks’ work, kid!”

  Another time, I made up my mind that I wanted to play with all the pretty little handles and buttons in the booth in the corner. I took a stool and a stack of phone books into it, plus my ham and cheese sandwich that I was supposed to eat in the kitchen, and I climbed up onto the control panel and set my juice cup on top of the shiny numbers. When I shut the door to the booth I discovered to my delight that the phosphorescent formula I had accidentally fallen into that morning made me glow a lovely green color in the dark, and I didn’t need to turn on the light at all. I spent quite a while admiring my luminous hands and trying to smear my sandwich with the same stuff. When I got bored I started climbing all over and pulling on all the handles. Eventually, needing to pee, I opened the door again—and stepped out into a mess of fighting shouting people in odd clothes, all of whom screamed in horror when they saw me.

  I know now that I must have scared those poor soldiers badly. They were busy fighting on the field of Quebec, smack dab in the middle of the French and Indian War, and had troubles enough without seeing a small, green, glowing girl in a gingham dress stepping out of a metal box.

  When I managed to get myself home, we were all speaking English instead of French. Can you imagine? Fortunately
I’ve always been good at languages. The first words I had to learn were, “Look what you’ve done to that dress, Natalie!” Mama scolded me all the way to the laundry room.

  My Mama was the original gasping, wide-eyed lab assistant, always ready to press a shapely hand to her breast and ask, “But, darling, isn’t it terribly dangerous?” Or exclaim, “Yes! And then everyone will live in peace and prosperity!” She must have been the only decorative sight in that room painted institutional green, full of test tubes and flatulent piping and humming machines and odd specimens floating in jars along the walls.

  By the time I was born, she didn’t spend much time in the lab. Papa liked to play dice with the laws of nature, and after a while he sabotaged not only his moral sense but his social skills as well, spending more and more time with the building blocks of life and less and less with the everyday business of it. In any case, Mama always found she had little energy to cook dinner after a long day of helping to create monsters.

  I was my parents’ only human creation, and I came about in the normal way. Apparently I inherited Mama’s looks and Papa’s brains. Again and again in my life I’ve gotten the best of a bad bargain.

  Papa never found out about Quebec, but I got into plenty of other trouble, so when I was seven he exiled me from the lab. I cried and cried the day he shut the door of that Aladdin’s cave of bright jeweled eyes and exciting noises, and sent me to the kitchen. Not long after this, Mama remembered that I ought to be in school. I did well there, once my teachers cured me of my longing to experiment on my fellow students. (“Hold still while I attach these electrodes. Considering the fact that you can’t even do multiplication, you won’t notice a thing after I do the brain exchange … . ”) But when I came home from school I always had to turn left, into the kitchen, instead of right, into the lab. This may be the reason that I always approach my lecture hall with a right turn, and that I always make sure that no matter what house I live in, the kitchen is on the right-hand side of the hall.

  So: into the kitchen I went. By the time I was ten I had hotwired an old toaster and a Waring blender so that I could conduct electrical experiments on peanut butter cookies. I spent two months solving the conduction problem. I had my own corner of the kitchen with my own stool. I worried that Mama would complain about the constant fizzing and the sparkle of arcing currents. But she hardly noticed the noise amid the daily din from the lab, the maniacal shouts and tortured roars of really dangerous science. I still have a hard time taking any research seriously unless I’ve had a good diabolical laugh over it.