The Superhero

As they turned the corner, ran the light, barely missed the mother and child in the crosswalk, and accelerated towards the next red light, he decided he’d seen enough.  He flew down from the building ledge where he’d been sitting, roughly pulled the genuinely surprised and then angry twenty-something-year-olds from the car, and proceeded to crumple the sixty-two corvette convertible into something barely recognizable as an automobile.  Then he flew away, consciously ignoring four-letter epithets he’d recently grown used to being hurled in his direction.  The real satisfaction he wore hidden under the smug indifference plastered across his face.  What were the young punks going to do about it?  He almost felt like going back just to ask, but he demurred.  There were other rights to wrong.

         Since his last brush with fire, he’d deliberately avoided burning buildings, no matter how many screams of “My baby! My baby!” he’d heard with his supersonic hearing.  If people were going to boo as he rescued guilty villains from fires, he’d just as soon let the babies’ burn also.  Who were they to judge?  Actually, he’d rush in a blur of supersonic speed, rescue the babies, and place them in knapsacks or whatever and let other people think they’d rescued them.  Was that a conscious?  Probably not, he thought, not in any real sense of the word.  It probably had more to do with ego; a coward’s last refuge.  He tried to be amazed at how quickly and completely people would take credit for rescuing the babies, even if they really had nothing to do with it.  Perhaps, they imagined it was “God’s Will.”

         He’d been amazed at his reaction.  He didn’t know that a child-molester being hunted by the police had been cordoned off in the apartment building.  He didn’t even know they were blaming the guy for setting the fire.  He suspected it had been set accidentally, or as he later came to understand, but some other do-gooder who felt compelled to rid the world of a disease at any expense.  He’d been busily whisking people off to safety, pulling them from the roofs, plucking them from the windowsills, and gently gliding the impatient jumpers to the ground when, suddenly,  he’d gotten the sense there was someone else left.  He quickly reentered and found the old guy passed out in the stairwell.  He imagined the wizened old guy was someone’s Grandpa.  As he exited, he halfway expected to hear the roars of applause at another avoided disaster.  Instead, he’d been booed.  A few people had even tossed pieces of trash at him, not that anything could hurt his exterior.  But inside, he had crumbled.  It had been the last ounce of disrespect he could take after all he had done for these people.  He’d rushed back into the air and begun to circle the flaming building faster and faster, while at the same time, blowing frigid air inside.  The fire had withered to nothingness, but as he circled, he’d become entranced by the speed and not recognized until far beyond stopping that the building had been reduced to pulverized brick and ash and was now being funneled up into the atmosphere, leaving an empty hole and stunned people far below.  It had been the first time he’d turned on them, but it had felt so good, so deserved.  He wasn’t even sure they had realized it was a turn.

         Now the headlines read, on a daily basis, of some destructive act, carried out by the “Superhero of our times.”  While watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, he’d become bored with the festivities and with a sigh of disgust had sent the balloons recklessly floating out to sea.  “Let Charlie Brown play with the whales,” had been his intention.  And so it was.  A few diehards had refused to let go of the wires.  “Too bad for them,” he’d thought.  Idiots, they’d been found hanging onto capsized dinghies, half-expecting him to come rescue them.

         This very morning, he heard a little girl crying for her cat to come down from the tree.  He softened, grabbed the kitty, and gently placed him in the arms of the waiting little girl below, only to have her spit on him and call him names he didn’t know little girls could pronounce.  Then the cat scratched at him, really trying to injure him.  He was uninjured and unfazed and with an unimaginable glee with he took the kitty back, flew to the top of the telephone pole and left the kitty.  “Let him scratch his way down from there and let the little girl cry herself dry of spit.”  He figured it was time she grew up to know just how cruel the world could be. Spit was not harmless.  Nor was he, he surmised.  That one thought brought his thoroughly unsatisfying cruelty to an end.

         In the weeks since he’d taken his hiatus from good deeds, of course, crime had increased.  Criminals needed little encouragement to do what came naturally.  The city would have to take a serious look at increasing their number of policemen.  Maybe they’d stop looking to the skies.  It might bankrupt the city but alas they would learn that having to fend for themselves was not cheap; a lesson he had learned for himself.

         On the few occasions that he chose to walk amongst them, he’d heard the grumblings of the malcontents and now he realized he was one of them.  It was a sobering and agonizing confession.  He’d always flown high above the dissatisfied doing a part-time job he thought he loved.  He wasn’t sure when it began to dawn on him that he wasn’t happy, probably just about the time he realized he expected to be thanked on a regular basis.  Actually, thanked wasn’t quite what he’d expected; adored was closer to the truth.  How pathetic!  Now he knew why being a superhero was such a short-lived career.  He also knew he was right to retire and let someone with more ideals take over.  Hopefully, their ideals would last longer than his.  Character was not indelible.