Special

by Chino Chakanga

  Shortwave inhibitors were much weaker and smaller. They were compact and incorporated into medical bracelets and handcuffs. Medical inhibitor bracelets were often prescribed to people suffering from Hyper AD or any other condition that prevented them from controlling their abilities.

  For safety reasons, it was mandatory for primary schools to have Long-wave Inhibitors with full coverage installed. It was also compulsory for schools to offer Ability Guidance in their curriculum. Ability Guidance aimed to educate kids about nurturing and mastering their abilities. It was often only during these classes that kids could use their abilities in primary schools.

  ***

  I grabbed the TV remote from the coffee table and sat beside Cody. I skimmed through a music video channel, a reality TV channel, and then a news channel covering a story about a vigilante called Titan.

  Titan, who was also often referred to as The Scarlet Saviour, had been saving lives and fighting crime for almost a year. Although there were numerous vigilantes in the past, Titan was renowned for his consistency, genuine willingness to help people, and his red arm length spandex. He was also the first costumed vigilante.

  Titan concealed his identity behind a red mask that tightly hugged and covered his face, leaving only openings for his eyes and mouth. He complemented his “scarlet” tights with a golden cape and golden boots.

  Titan was initially referred to as The Scarlet Saviour in his heyday due to an article titled “Scarlet Saviour Lifts Car to Save Family.” He was later christened Titan after the release of a Q&A article about his valiant efforts. The article was titled “The Scarlet Saviour: A Titan of Strength and Inspiration.” Titan must have taken a liking to the name. He subsequently updated his costume by sewing a symbolic gold “T” in a white oval-shaped patch with gold edges across his chest.

  In the television news report, Titan had saved a couple of people from a burning building. A female reporter questioned him in front of the building. A few onlookers watched from behind a police perimeter line. Firefighters inspected the extinguished building in the background.

  ‘Your heroic efforts are inspiring,’ the reporter said. ‘More people are donning capes and masks to save lives. What are your thoughts on the increase in vigilantism?’

  ‘The term vigilante would imply that I don’t have faith in our legal system—’

  ‘Hero, then?’ the reporter suggested.

  ‘I think our officials are doing a great job,’ Titan modestly continued, ‘but they can only do so much. I see what I’m doing as simply lending a hand. I can’t stand by knowing I have the power to make a difference.’

  The news report caught Cody’s attention. Titan had amassed a legion of fans, including Cody.

  ‘I’m sure there are a lot of people dying to know the man who risks his life to save others,’ the reporter said. ‘I know I am. Will we ever get to know the man behind the mask?’

  ‘I don’t do what I do for recognition. Titan is more than one man. Titan is a proponent of hope — a symbol of humanity’s hidden strength, potential and fighting spirit. A symbol that I hope inspires—’

  I changed to a channel airing a cast interview, and a third and final trailer for “The Hunter’s Curse” — a popular book that had been adapted for the screen.

  ‘I was watching that!’ Cody groaned.

  ‘You were playing games!’ I retorted.

  Cody lunged for the remote. I gripped it tighter and pulled my hand away before he could snatch it. I stood up and used my height to my advantage, holding the remote out of his reach. He aimlessly jumped for it. I stepped onto the sofa to get a higher ground advantage. Cody followed and relentlessly tugged at my jersey. Our scuffle knocked down some pillow cushions from the sofa. I kept my hand raised high and obliviously watched the TV. Cody pushed and shoved. I nearly lost my balance on the soft cushions of the sofa. I stepped down and slowly paced around the sofa while occasionally stealing a glance at the TV. Cody wouldn’t let up. I brushed him off. He staggered backwards and landed on his bottom. He quickly got up and persisted.

  ‘I was here first,’ he scowled.

  ‘You can’t watch and play—’

  I heard the audible cracking of my bones before I registered the pain. Cody stepped on my right foot, hard. It was as though an anvil hit me. A scream tore through my throat. I let go of the remote and dropped to the sofa in agony. I rubbed my foot to soothe the pain. Before I knew it, Mum was sitting beside me with her hand on my shoulder.

  ‘What happened?’ she demanded.

  ‘She started it,’ Cody said with a smug look on his face. ‘She wouldn’t let me watch.’

  ‘Can you walk?’ Mum asked me.

  I nodded.

  She helped me up. I hissed and pulled my face as my foot touched the ground. I leaned on Mum for support. She ordered Cody to get the door. He did as commanded. His smug look quickly faded.

  Chapter 3

  ‘It’s definitely broken,’ a young female doctor said while holding a tablet displaying an X-ray scan of my foot. I shifted on the examination table I was lying on to get a good look at the X-ray. Mum stood beside the examination table. She hadn’t left my side since we got to the hospital. A nurse had injected me with a painkiller while we waited to see the doctor. I could barely feel the lower part of my right leg and foot as it rested on a cushion.

  ‘These are the points of fracture,’ the doctor said, pointing at the X-ray.

  My foot was broken in three places.

  ‘You have fractures on the third, fourth and fifth metatarsals,’ she explained. ‘The good news is that the fractures are all transverse. The bad news is that you’ll be needing a cast.’

  ***

  Dad arrived at the hospital a little after the doctor completed putting the cast around my lower leg. I would have to wear it and use crutches for a few weeks. Cody didn’t say much. We sat in silence in the waiting room while Mum signed some papers at the reception desk and spoke to the doctor about the painkiller prescription and her concerns on how it might affect or clash with the drugs from my treatment.

  ‘Dad!’ Cody perked up the moment he spotted Dad. ‘Guess what?’

  Cody lifted the three-seater waiting room chair I was seated on before Dad could get a word in.

  ‘Put me down!’ I ordered.

  ‘Whoa!’ Dad gasped.

  ‘Put me down!’ I grumbled.

  ‘Put your sister down,’ Dad instructed.

  Cody complied. He gently lowered the seat and gave Dad a long hug.

  ‘I stepped on Hope’s foot,’ Cody murmured.

  ‘I heard,’ said Dad. ‘Did you apologise?’

  ‘I didn’t mean to,’ Cody protested. ‘She was hogging the remote.’

  ‘Apologise to your sister.’

  Cody turned to face me and in his most genuine and sympathetic tone said, ‘I’m sorry.’

  I crossed my arms and turned away. It was one thing to be humiliated by random kids, being humiliated by my little brother whom I was supposed to protect — my baby brother who once upon a time would only allow me to feed him — was like a dagger through the heart. I tried hard to fight back the tears. Cody’s stunts evoked my old fears of him outgrowing me.

  Dad turned his attention to me.

  ‘How’s the leg?’ he asked.

  ***

  Dad would take me flying when I was younger. When I was a baby, he would apparently hover around the house with me in his arms to get me to stop crying or put me to sleep. One of my fondest memory was when I was about nine. I had slipped into a coma due to complications that caused my blood pressure to significantly lower. When I came too, I was in a private room tethered to an IV machine and monitors via some telemetry leads. Mum was seated in an armchair by my bedside flipping through a magazine. My lips were chapped. My throat dry and coarse like sandpaper.

  ‘Mum,’ I groggily let out.

  Mum gasped in relief and dropped the magazine. She leaned forward and gently caressed my cheek. I was out f
or three days and couldn’t recall anything. The last thing I remembered was the doctor asking me to count backwards before a nurse put an oxygen mask over my mouth. I barely got to six before everything went black.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Mum assured me. She ran her hand through my hair. Her eyes welled up with tears. ’It’s okay,’ she whispered.

  I couldn’t have been hospitalised for longer than two weeks, but it felt like forever. Although I had shed most of the cords attached to the monitors, I felt more caged with each day that passed. The hospital food sucked. My days were monotonous and restrictive. My daily schedule began with monitoring and examination by the day shift nurse, followed by breakfast at eight; personal hygiene at nine; lunch at twelve-thirty; a walk around the hospital, dragging my IV pole along; dinner at eighteen thirty, followed by some more monitoring before bedtime.

  One day, the doctor that had operated on me personally came to check up on me. Mum and Dad moved away from my bedside to give him some room.

  ‘How’s my favourite patient doing?’ he asked.

  ‘Okay,’ I responded.

  ‘Just okay?’

  ‘She keeps asking when she can go home,’ said Mum.

  ‘Soon,’ the doctor said. ‘We need to make sure you’re a hundred per cent before we let you go, okay?’

  I reluctantly nodded.

  The doctor attached a blood pressure cuff to my upper arm and observed the readings on the electronic monitors. He examined my chest with a stethoscope and studied the monitors before scribbling something on a chart.

  ‘Vitals are excellent,’ he announced. He turned to me. ‘With these readings, you’ll be out of here in no time.’

  ‘Thank you, doctor,’ Mum said.

  ‘I’ll be in to check on you in the morning,’ the doctor told me before leaving.

  ‘Hold on, Doc!’ Dad called, following the doctor into the hallway. They returned after a few minutes. Dad wore a big smile. The doctor carefully began removing the lead placements attached to my chest, carefully living the electrode sticker ends on.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Mum asked.

  ‘We’re gonna go out for a while,’ Dad told me. He opened the closet and retrieved a change of clothes and a pair of boots for me.

  ‘Is that a good idea?’ Mum asked.

  ‘Some fresh air won’t do any harm,’ the doctor responded.

  That day Dad took me flying along the coast. He flew low enough that I could touch the water. It was also the first time we had flown very high. We soared through misty clouds and flew near a flock of seagulls. Dad stopped and hovered along the coast near a watchtower. We watched the sunset over the sea. I looked down and held on to Dad tighter.

  ‘They kind of look like insects from up here, don’t they?’ Dad said, referring to some people walking along the beach.

  I nodded. I moved my hand over the people shading them from my perspective. ’Up here, we’re like giants.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Dad said. He ran his free hand on along the IV needle tapped around my forearm down to the patient band around my wrist.

  ‘You are stronger and braver than you know,’ he told me. ‘The needles and medicines are nothing to giant, are they?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I agreed.

  ‘It will all be over soon. Before you know, you’ll be able to fly or teleport like mum.’

  ‘I wanna fly,’ I said.

  I yawned and rested my head on Dad’s shoulder. The rhythm of his breath was tranquil. We continued to watch the sunset until I fell asleep.

  The tests and treatments didn’t stop. Dad was right about one thing though: being untethered from the ground was liberating. Flying was the ultimate form of freedom. The perspective from the sky made people and structures seem diminutive. Flying was an escape that made all problems and the treatments seem inconsequential.

  I looked forward to the day I could fly on my own.

  ***

  ‘Hope?’ Dad called. ‘Are you okay?’

  He laid a sympathetic hand on my shoulder. I shrugged it off. Nothing could quell the pain brought on by Cody’s actions.

  Unlike Mum, Dad knew when to back off. He was also infallibly noble. He turned his attention towards Cody and reprimanded him. ‘Your abilities are a gift and should be treated as such. They are not meant to be used to bully and belittle others. Gifts are meant to be shared.’

  Dad’s talk of belittlement made me feel small and inept. I am hopeless, I thought. Cody didn’t need me. Dad had given up on me. Mum had invested so much time and money towards fixing me, but I was a hopeless case. Hopeless, hopeless, hopeless!

  Chapter 4

  The drive home was pretty intense. What started as a light conversation quickly turned into a confrontation. My parents hardly fought, but at the time, it was all they seemed to do.

  ‘If you truly had urgent matters to attend to, the least you could have done was to notify me.’

  Dad got an earful of it. He was bombarded with question after question.

  Questions to which he had no answers.

  ***

  Mum and Dad met when Mum literally fell into Dad’s lap. Mum had telekinetically hovered to save a cat stuck in a tree. The stubborn cat scratched her soon after she retrieved it. The pain of the scratch caused her to lose her concentration and control over her newly mimicked telekinesis abilities. She plummeted to the ground. Dad, who happened to be walking by, flew to her aid and caught both her and the cat.

  Mum and Dad both told me the story a couple of times, but I specifically recall one occasion vividly. I was hospitalised during one of my treatments. Mum had fallen asleep on a chair by my bedside when Dad came to visit. He grabbed a folded extra blanket from the edge of my bed and covered Mum.

  ‘Have I ever told you how I met your Mum?’ he asked me, as he watched her sleeping. I shook my head, and that’s when he told me.

  ‘She was the most beautiful and uncoordinated thing I had ever seen,’ he started. His eyes lit up as he watched her. His eyes hadn’t lit up that way in ages — not with them constantly fighting.

  ***

  ‘What could have been so urgent that you had to leave Cody home alone?’ Mum persisted.

  ‘I can take care of myself,’ Cody said in an attempt to extinguish the heated argument. His words were vaporised by the wild flames that had been spreading for months.

  ‘Stop the car,’ Dad calmly requested.

  ‘Typical! Just like you to run away from everything,’ Mum barked.

  ‘I’m not running. I don’t think this is the appropriate time for this discussion.’

  ‘When would be the right time, Ray?’ Mum demanded. ‘Lately, you’re forever off running endless errands that seem to be more important than anything else. You’re so busy that you couldn’t be bothered to look after your son or make it to your daughter’s appointments!’

  Dad hadn’t been to any of my treatments in over a year.

  ‘At least I know when to give up!’ Dad snapped.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Mum hissed.

  ‘You treat Hope like she’s sick and needs fixing,’ Dad sighed. ‘Not everything has to be perfect… No one is perfect, Elle.’

  Dad got his wish. Mum slammed the brakes, jerking us all forward. We were fortunately restrained by our seatbelts. Mum turned to apologise to Cody and me.

  Dad got out of the car and slammed the door shut.

  ‘Dad, wait!’ Cody pleaded.

  He scuffled to unbuckle his seatbelt and raced after Dad. ‘Don’t leave.’

  Dad knelt, bringing himself down to Cody’s level.

  ‘I’ll be back. I just need to get some air.’

  Cody didn’t respond.

  ‘How about we go to Nova World next Saturday?’ Dad offered.

  Cody nodded, disappointed. He had been nagging Dad to go to the new Nova World theme park for weeks, he should have shown a little enthusiasm.

  ‘You be good, okay.’

  Cody nodded.

  Dad got up a
nd walked away. He stared at the car over his shoulder before flying away.

  Cody sauntered back towards the car, defeated. He took his time getting in. He slammed the door shut and stared down for a moment before he exploded at me. ‘It’s all your fault! Why couldn’t you be normal?’

  ‘Cody!’ Mum reprimanded.

  Cody persisted. ‘They’re fighting because of you!’

  ‘It’s no one’s fault,’ Mum interjected, putting an end to Cody’s assault.

  Cody crossed his arms and stared down.

  ‘It’s not your fault, Hope,’ Mum assured me after a moment, but her words couldn’t soothe the lump building in my throat. They couldn’t dry the tears forming in my eyes. Cody was right. Things would probably have been different without me, but what cut deeper were Dad’s words — “At least I know when to give up!” His words incessantly replayed in my mind. Many times I had told myself the treatments were pointless. I had lost faith. With Dad’s loss of interest in my treatments, I was sure he had given up, and although I thought I had come to terms with it, his affirmation hurt.

  Cody crossed his arms and stared out of the side of his window. I stared out of the side of my window to conceal my tears. The rest of the drive home was quiet.

  Chapter 5

  Cody got out of the car, closed the door shut and flounced into the house. I opened my side of the door and carefully put my weight on my good leg while I retrieved my crutches that were propped between the front seats. I dropped one and strained to the ground to get it. Mum tried to assist me.

  ‘I got it!’ I snapped.

  She backed away. It took some considerable effort, but I managed to pick it up. I placed both crutches under my arms for support and limped towards the house. The ajar house door began to open wider as I approached. I looked over my shoulder. Mum had her hand raised in concentration as she telekinetically opened the door.

  I entered and headed straight to my room. Mum entered and closed the door behind her.