2021

Bog

After all this, she identified the monster she had been crafting. Barry was building a Bolt suit, following a new modernized concept, he was recreating it from zero and she, on the other end, was possibly making an abomination.

How did she go from extinguished to lit up, how did she go from barely making it out alive of work at the end of the day to driving home merrily, smiling at the angry commuters on the road and eager to start the end of the day, to live it, as fully as if it was another actual day? She called herself crazy for it, for climbing the staircase of her building two by two, for taking a moment to catch her breath in front of her apartment door, for tidying the hair behind her ear before entering the place.

Then there was the day the news announced that after almost ten months of sudden disappearance, the Team of local superheroes had come back to the city. As she was almost ready to leave for work, Eugenie’s hand holding her coffee cup had frozen above her smartphone. “A possible wormhole or lapse in the time continuity…” she read aloud, almost screaming at Barry, who jumped from his seat and came to consult the article by her side.

“Hobbes, the main speaker and known identity of the group of superbeings, says that—” Barry gasped and read too, then let the sentence trail off “It was a covert mission, that ‘s why I didn’t know about it”

“They were on the Moon” she said, I fucking hate the moon, “don’t worry, I’m going to take the day off”

Barry turned his eyes towards her, they were vacant, empty, very large. So near her, he was soaring one head taller than her “why?”

“Well” Yeah why? She asked herself, and she didn’t really know “we can… get in touch with— We can—” she stopped herself, shivered and gurgled a very cold air contrasting with the warmth of her coffee. The vibes of the flat had sunk and chills the size of cantaloupes dropped along her spine. She only then noticed the somber expression on Barry’s traits. Oh, she thought. That must be what criminals he fought as a superhero saw before he kicked their asses. That was possibly his ired face. Fascinating, “you don’t agree Barry?” she was so captivated that she handed him the stick to beat her down.

“Look at you” he snapped –phew, already?— “taking control of things. You don’t know shit about Hobbes, Ms White, and you don’t know shit about superhero things”

“What the fuck is that tone” she questioned, while in strangely familiar territory, the one of an old classroom, she remembered, the one she had been assigned during the years Barry attended her lessons, and that classroom from the past didn’t even have a window. In the winter, students and teachers could all forget that daylight existed. She almost laughed at the familiarity but thought it best to repress it. She straightened her back.

He took a deep breath “it’s not a tone!”

“Well what is it?”

“You’re a nobody Eugenie White” he spat at her, “you think someone like Hobbes is going to listen to you?”

Thanks to years of being bullied by adolescents, Eugenie darted a blasé eye at him, sipping on her coffee with exaggerated slurping noise, “control your emotions, Barry, you’re way out of line” No wonder twenty-five percent of educators didn’t survive their first year in a school. And a half. Or their first six months, if they worked in a middle school.

“Then detain me, send me to the principal’s office” he stood up to face her, his nostrils flaring. He was so tall.

“Hum” he was really towering her. She forced herself out of her reverie, remembering she also had to hold her ground, “Detain you? First of all Barry, tell me what the fuck is going on. And second of all—” The same cold air bumped inside her mouth, she closed it. Opened it again and hesitated. She changed her mind.

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“Say it” he challenged her, fuming

“I wasn’t going to say anything” she lied “I actually didn’t have a second of all comeback this time” she lied more “Barry I would never—” Remorse obstructed her throat, for even thinking about the words. That’s what people on their first year of teaching didn’t comprehend, the ones who fled in front of savage creatures entering into and soaking in puberty: those young people’s anger and merciless attacks came from pure deep pain in their hearts.

“You want me to leave! You want to get rid of me!”

“But—”

He had slammed the door of the bedroom like it was his, forgetting that she still had her badge, shoes and car keys to pick up from there. Looking at her watch and realizing that she would not make it to the first period of the school day, she took a deep breath and entered her sleeping quarters, “I’m still mad!” Barry roared at her.

“Me too!” she frowned at him, gathering her things in energetic strides, “you are acting like such a dick”

That evening, after suffering many other outbursts and excesses of drama from her teenagers, breaking some rumbles in the recreation area, fighting over the last strawberries of the supermarket and facing some more road-rage on her way back, she still came home with the same giddiness in her heart as she had in the past few months, and she really wondered if she was insane. Had she, in a way, missed little Douchebarry? The thought disturbed her.

She dropped her heavy grocery bags, out of breath, delicately depositing the strawberries on the table and admiring their shine for a second. She found the apartment spotless, all the old socks removed from the floor, cat toys gathered in a nice pile. As she drew a finger to swipe the entrance shelves, she found no trace of dust.

Wow. Everything had been sprinkled and smelled like lemon. Even the glass panels of the windows looked like there was no window anymore, letting in the sunlight on the grateful plants in their pots. A bouquet of orange tulips was displayed in the middle of the dinner table, inside a vase that she had never seen before. Barry got out of the bathroom in his underwear shorts and a towel in his hand, his hair wet dripping on his neck and shoulders. Their eyes met and he jumped “Jesus fucking Christ you scared me” he landed a hand on his heart, but on the wrong side of his chest, “you’re early”

“I’m not early” she said

“Ah shit” he shook his head, “I was looking at your clock in the bathroom the whole time and forgot it’s out of batteries again. Your bathroom is like the land of what-the-fuck o’clock” She looked at him while he was rubbing his hair inside the towel, the huge scar on his abdomen barely shrunk from the initial healing phase, forming a very ugly hook on the side, still swollen in the middle. She listened to his breathing, calm, filling the quiet room. She listened to the grocery paper bags crinkle as they unfolded from her tight grip on them. Our bathroom, she thought.

Barry never had a problem with parading half naked in the house. She stood and said nothing, intrigued and perturbed at the same time. He would carelessly just take his shirt off without warning to bring his stomach just under her nose and require that she would examine his scar since the first day he had started taking care of himself without her help, like a baby koala proud of his newly acquired grooming skills.

“Look at it, it’s getting better, don’t you think? It doesn’t have that awful purple hue anymore”

“Barry, put a shirt on”

He would take a step back, feigning confusion, “Why? You have seen my butt, haven’t you? You have cleaned my puke and sponged my blood and seen my butt, haven’t you?”

She would smile at him horribly “yes, it is getting better, Barry. Good job” he made her feel so inadequate for raising an issue about his domestic exhibitionism, “I’m just saying it’s cold, it’s winter, you’re going to catch death”

“Death” he would snort, “I laugh at death”

“I’m just saying”

“Blablabla” It was not winter anymore, and they were entering Spring at full speed thanks to global warming, and Barry was too many times not wearing any shirt.

Eugenie White just felt tense, strangely tense. Tense like weight in her chest, a looming headache rod, ringing in her ears, like, bungee-rope-tense.

Could she be his mother, by way of calculations of age? Yes, she saw, cringing. MOM, she recalled painfully from her encounter with Barry’s date, Anatolia. A young mom, for sure, but the reality was possible, biologically feasible. She felt tense because he was, like, how could she put it. Her ears rang and popped, sounds blurred like she was underwater, rapidly restored clearer than before. Because he was, because she was … Yes? her inside voice sneered

I’m trying to find a way to put it, she demanded

I’m curious as to how you will manage to put it.

What do you mean

That you are a weirdo.

Oh I will, I will find a way to put it, believe me. She left Barry to marinate in the silence and closed her eyes and took the time to think. Conquered by sensory overload after the long and overstimulating Friday, Eugenie let her mind absorb the quieter sounds of the house, the clock ticking, wood planks of the floor cracking softly, paper un-tucking and scrunching, the light water drops from the faucet to the sink.