by Jen Finelli
So research organizations before you give. Check the salaries of top-tier employees: some “non-profit” CEOs are actually raking in six figures. Did you know that the Susan G. Komen foundation spends millions of dollars suing other breast cancer organizations over slogans? Did you know Planned Parenthood takes breast cancer donations, but doesn’t do mammograms, or even the basic preventative breast care? Don’t get scammed. Try to give to smaller, local organizations with less overhead, or directly to research foundations rather than to the corporate “awareness” middlemen.
Look for legitimate opportunities at volunteermatch.org.
Mark of the Beast
Mark O’Donnell
I am hunting a superhero.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not prejudiced or nothing. Some of my best friends are superheroes.
Well, my one best friend. My only friend. He doesn't know that I know.
My drunk dad snores in the other room. The drip, drip, drip of the leak in the corner of my room—I bet it's driven me crazy. The sky-blue covers of the old psychiatry textbook on my bed, the red sociology magazines on the slanted bedside table, fray...my sheetless, bedless mattress, on the floor, is starting to pop springs.
The sun's gone, behind the layer of smog coating the city in the distance out my window. Here in the suburbs my Dad's stirring on the couch, and I hear the click of another beer opening, and static, canned voices as the TV turns on. If you listen with your eyes closed and your mouth open, you can hear the creak of the neighbor's window opening, and a soft rush of wind as my best friend flies out of it.
Like I said, my neighbor's a superhero.
But not everyone deserves to be a hero. I grab my laptop—scuffed-up thing I built from pieces I found in my neighbors' garbage—and place it in my backpack. Wool cap and torn nylon stocking, from my father's drawer, tickle my palms. I detest this itchy material, but it's all I have.
I don't use the window like my neighbor does. I stroll through the living room, no sudden movements, past my father and some half-naked females on the TV. I'm at the back door when he throws a beer bottle at me.
Twitch, and crash—my head tilts to dodge as the bottle breaks on the door jamb by my ear. His aim's improving.
“Where are you going, bitch?” he drawls.
“Study group.” I tighten my lips.
“Ha, you're fulla shit. I know you don't study. They'd never let a mess like you into one of those honors programs. That's for rich brats. Naw, you, you're a loser, like your old man.” He coughs. He always has tears in his red, white, and blue eyes, whether he's insulting himself or not. I'm not even 100% sure I actually register in his distant stare. Can alcohol make you blind? Gotta look that up.
“Naw, I know what you're doing,” he goes on. “You're sneaking out to fuck. You find your own little slut, boy?”
“Sure, Dad, I found my own slut.” I aim for something between a smile and cowering in fear, something he'll like; I don't actually feel anything. I never do. “You got me there.”
“You sassing me? That sarcasm?” He's thinking about rising. I remember when I was little, when I'd scream inside Oh God please don't let him stand up please please—
I don't feel those things now. “No, Dad, you're just right as usual. Any tips for me?”
“Tips?” He scoffs like I've asked him to add one plus one. “Fuck 'er and leave 'er, son. Don' give her a chance to ruin you. No fucking kids...” His speech slurs and quiets as his eyelids droop. “No fucking kids.”
“Thanks, Dad,” I whisper, as I escape out the door.
*
The one thing I'm proud of, that I got from my father, is my hunter instinct. He says it should be my looks: I should be grateful I look like him, because if I looked like my traitor mother he'd probably either kill me or fuck me by mistake.
This is hilarious to him.
I remember kneeling in the woods on a hunting trip, roots digging into my knee and the smell of earth and moss seeping like tendrils into my brain, with my finger on a trigger. My father's body pressed against my shoulder and over my back, as his breath coaxes in my ear. “Steady...” Sticky sweat and camo paint run down my cheeks as the twelve-point buck passes our blind...
He was so proud of me then, back before she-who-bore-me decided that having a man and a kid wasn't good for her mental health, before she left me alone with her fraying psychiatry textbooks. She wasn't proud. Eating that ground-up stale meat from the store was okay, but hunters are the scum of the earth. She told me so, in front of him. I looked it up, that grocery-store meat: factory farm slaughterhouses torture cows and pigs before killing them. I didn't torture anything I killed, I told her.
That was true, back then.
I showed her all the pictures of pigs skinned alive by factory machines, and then told her how I hit the deer dead in one shot, and as I stood there with my father glowing, and my heart pumping with pride, she pushed her lips together tight and didn't say anything. That's the one thing I got from my mother, that I'm proud of. That kind of silence is a weapon. It hurt, when I could feel things.
Now it's my weapon. My lips press together as I speed up my steps in the silent darkness at the edge of my neighborhood. They did a study that found sociopaths have slower heart rates than normal people, and I'm convinced this is one of those rare moments when my heart beats normally, fast, blood rushing to my face and hands and warming me as I reach into my hoodie pocket to plug my earphones into the police radio that's timing my steps. Step, step, bus to third, into the worst part of the city. Step, step, walk to sixth—that'll be tough, those three streets—then take the train.
The train'll take me within five minutes of the climb.
I lick my lips. They're chapped, and I shouldn't lick them. But I'm this close to catching a superhero today.
*
The bus sways to a stop. I step out into the darkness. Two ladies on the furthest street corner look away from me as the shadows play over their long, naked legs. There's a bearded man snoring on a flat piece of cardboard behind me. This stop smells like piss.
The voices on the radio pace along with me as I walk, my Irish eyes twitching from shade to shade, watching for sudden movements or creeping things. Soon my crime will happen. Then the tip to the police goes off from my phone. Then the superhero picks up the alarm on the radio. Then I bag him.
I reach the second street. I have five minutes before I need to be on that roof.
And some giant decides to block the road.
He sways around the corner and shoves me. I stumble back, not because I've lost my balance, but because it'll make me look more subservient than I am. The cigarette dangling on the man's lip twitches when he talks.
“You don't wanna be here, kid.”
“Sorry, I'm just leaving.”
“Not with your wallet, you aren't. This is 109 territory. You've got dues to pay. You know.”
“The 109s don't shake up kids, and they don't work in this city,” I say.
He drops his cigarette. The light flickers on the ground. It's beautiful, you know that? I am the cigarette light, flickering in the alleyway, flickering and stinking.
“So you're smart,” he smirks. “How's this: I've never seen you before, and this is my street.”
He shoves me again.
This time I stumble back so far there's no resistance. I'm jello, and he pushes into me, and falls, and I'm free to run.
But the cigarette glows...
Don't.
I do.
I scoop it up and burn the end of it into his calf, right between his sneaker and his jeans. I love the sizzle. His scream raises my heartbeat, tickles my lip, my chest—
He roars and whips around like a cat, faster than a cat, his paw catching me in the face. Light flashes in my head with the blow. Now he's got my neck, closing off my carotids. His knee's in my solar plexus. In my earbuds, the police radio lights up with the report of a bomb.
Well now I'm late.
*—no, no�
��
No. I won't pass out. If I wasn't allowed to pass out with my dad's fist pounding on my back forever, all those times, it's unfair if I pass out now.
Can't breathe, though.
I force my hands to let go of my neck, to fall limp, so he thinks he's choked me to death. Let go, hands. Don't be scared. I'm not.
Doesn't seem to be working! No, no, no, I'm going to be late...the time's ticking with my fading vision, late, late, late!
My hands find my hoodie pocket—I draw my dad's gun, jam it against the giant's chest—I smile.
His eyes follow mine, and he lets me go. If he really wanted he could wrestle me for it, but people have this weird respect for guns.
Or maybe it's my smile. The teachers leave me alone, too, when I smile like that. I have too many teeth.
He backs up, cursing, yelling at me, the standard things about how fucked up I am. I'm not listening. The police radio's on fire in my ears! I'm late. I'm late, I'm late, I'm late.
Panic—is this panic, or rage? I have no idea, but I'm so whatever that I could shoot this guy. Late, he made me late! This superhero shouldn't get away from me. Oh, I could kill this guy. But I could only make one special bullet, and it's for the superhero, so with some swearing of my own I run down through the third alley and dash towards the building that always leaves its fire escape down.
Are you kidding me, the fire escape isn't down. Yeah, that's rage. My teeth grind together and there's red in the corners of my vision. That's rage. Punch the concrete—go back and shoot that guy—
That would be stupid, though.
I look around for some kind of rope or something to pull the fire escape down with, rifling through the nearest dumpster, wondering about discarded needles laced with drug and HIV in the dark and then
the police radio reports sightings of a cloaked figure.
Aaaagh!
My lips purse together like hers. My heart's slow, slow and hard. I could rip an animal in two right now. That's a waste. To even think about. That's screwed up, objectively, even though I feel no shame. Cold rage ices my fingertips as they pick through the trash. My teeth grind, grind, grind...
I find some of that long plastic that they tie boxes shut with, the stuff that's like giant zip-ties. I tie it to a brick, and throw the brick, and loop it over the fire escape, and pull it down, and run up, and put the stocking over my face and the hat over that, and trip and fall as I run across the roof to the other side. I can see across the street to the abandoned building below that houses my “bomb threat” finally!
He's in there. I see his cloaked shadow through the cracked window. I'm late, so late that I hear police sirens already—they always arrive at least ten minutes after he does—and I see him searching this way and that, holding the bomb in his hand. He's smart. He knows it's a dud. He's looking for a trap.
And just as he looks out the window, just before our eyes meet, I yank back the slide and fire.
*
It takes a lot to build a tranquilizer gun out of a normal gun meant to kill people. With the internet, though, anything is possible. Even kidnapping and drugging the greatest superhero of all time.
The Dark Denizen. In the flickering candlelight of this sealed-off, abandoned cellar, the knight of starlight lies before me, his head lolling to the side on the cement floor. Each limb is sealed to a different steel pipe—extra-quick-dry cement works as fast as I do. I had time: so far my calculations about the tranquilizer dose and his weight seem correct.
He's strong enough to tear the pipes out of the wall when he wakes up, so I've crossed two-by-fours above my head and balanced three huge cement blocks on them. If he tears himself free, they'll fall and crush me. I'm handcuffed to the spot, and he's got the key in his closed left fist, encased in cement. He can't rescue me without ripping his hand free, and he can't rip his hand free without killing me. There's a note that explains all this taped to the ceiling above his head.
He should wake in about five minutes.
I breathe. He breathes. His cape's pitch-black, and cut in triangles on the edges. Holes mark it, tears. I guess it's not titanium weave like I'd thought. I guess that doesn't exist. Beads of sweat mark the scruff on his chin. It's not grey scruff. It's not a double-chin. The wrinkles on the corners of his mouth aren't deep.
I haven't removed his mask, or the hood sewn to it. The mask's black, and pointed at the corners, around slanted eyes. Maybe he's Indian. I don't know. I won't see. I respect the mask.
I have my own mask: my face. The stocking cap, the police radio, my hoodie, everything's gone, and I'm here in my boxers and a t-shirt, looking scared and young. He'll never find the criminal who captured him and set up this puzzle. That guy's gone somewhere, who knows where, hey, I'm just another victim of some deranged sociopath.
I obsess while I wait. I am what you might call a psychiatric hypochondriac. It's not a real term.
You know what is real? You know how sometimes, when you're depressed, you wish you had thyroid cancer, or some awful virus, to explain how tired you are, how your back hurts for no freaking reason, how you feel pissy like a girl, how you keep getting fatter and slower, and losing concentration, and you feel stupider and sometimes in class they ask you a question and nothing comes out of your mouth? “I have cancer,” you wish you could say. It'd be a great excuse for when you just want to sleep all the time and never open your eyes again.
But that's f'd up, so I don't think those thoughts. Often. Instead I read my mother's old textbooks. I think, and I think the books think, that I am depressed. That I got antisocial personality disorder. I don't know for sure. I'm not a doctor, and I'm not eighteen, and you cannot have ASPD before you're 18. You can have conduct disorder, maybe. Only thing I know for sure I don't have is bipolar disorder. Never had spikes of energy like that. Wish I did.
Or maybe there's nothing wrong with me, and I'm just a terrible person thinking terrible things.
So that's why I'm a psychiatric hypochondriac: the only thing wrong with me is I think there's something wrong with me.
I struggle to strangle my grin as the Dark Denizen opens his eyes. I can lie my way out of anything. The psychiatry textbooks say that's what sociopaths do. Psychiatry's the closest thing I've got to a Scripture. A script.
He groans, softly, like dad with a hangover.
“Wait Mister Denizen, read above you!” I cry out before he can move. He reads, and lets out his breath in a sigh, and a growl.
“What's going on? What's happening? Are you really the Dark Denizen?” Stupid questions protect me and disorient him.
His voice stuns me with its soft depth. “It's alright. We'll have to figure it out together. And yes,” he turns to look me in the eye. His are almost purple. “I am the Dark Denizen.”
I have so many questions and accusations, but he asks me, first.
“What's your name, man?” Not boy, or son, but man.
“Mark O'Donnell, sir.” Reality is a good mask.
“Drop that sir stuff. Although it is very polite: I appreciate that.” The way he says very? Indian for sure. “I will need your help to get us out of here, okay, Mark? Please tell me everything you remember about how you were brought here.”
Please. He's very polite. “I—I don't know. I was on my way home from school, and this guy in a van pulled up and asked for my help with his engine. I—he put a cloth over my face? I woke up here. I'm sorry, I—” I stop before crossing the border into whiny. Brave naïve child, with a trembling upper lip, that's the goal.
“Did he do anything to you? Make you swallow anything?”
Swallow things? Wonder who he's dealt with lately. “No.”
“Did he mention a bomb? A cave-in? Anything to do with time?” Ah, nice. He's measuring steps like I do.
“No, he didn't.”
“Do you remember what he looked like?”
“Yeah, yeah he was tall, with black hair and blue eyes—really pale guy, kind of fat?” I'm describing myself, except for th
e tall.
“Did he say why he chose you?” He's picked up on my self-description. Wheels turn in his eyes. He's trying to think like the psychopath. Again, nice.
“No...” I'm tired of his questions. “I'm sorry, sir, but shouldn't we be trying to get out of here before he comes back?”
“His personality may give us some clues to escape. He doesn't just want to kill me, I think, unless there was poison...” He looks for his wrist, to the blood monitor normally pinned there, but it's buried under the cement. “He wants to destroy my identity by making me kill you. I need to know how patient he is, and how long we have to figure this out before we both die.”
“He's very patient,” I say.
He squints at me. I cough.
“He didn't yell or freak out or anything,” I say. “He seemed quiet. Maybe shy? Kinda weird?”
The Denizen looks around, at all the corners of the room. I've left it empty. Just him, me, the pipes, the flickering candle, the low roof, the wood over my head. His utility belt's dangling from a hook behind me, but I smashed the microphone I saw on the side, so its voice-activated functions can't help him.
“Mark,” he says. “You're going to have to get yourself free.”
Wasn't expecting that.
“You'll have to get out of those cuffs, and get to my belt. There's a little vial that'll dissolve this cement.”
Why would he...
“You'll have to be extremely careful. We don't want to break these pipes. For all we know they could be filled with poison gas.”