Being Epic

More free fiction, this time a piece that originally appeared in Cream City Review, in an issue guest-edited by Frances Sherwood.

When I first began to fall through the floor, I wasn’t sure what was happening. The kitchen seemed oddly distorted. The stripes of the wallpaper slanted a little to the left; the orange light of sunset lay over them like a flare of panic. My parents noticed nothing.

My mother was eating a fish sandwich, the McDonald’s wrapper neatly folded in front of her as she dabbed on mayonnaise. My father scraped the pickles and onions off his hamburger with his forefinger, which was streaked with the thick red of ketchup. Only my brother saw and looked at me as the chair’s back legs pierced the linoleum beneath my swinging feet and I tilted back with agonizing slowness.

I didn’t want to say anything at first. We usually didn’t talk much at the dinner table. Most of the time we didn’t eat at the table at all. My father brought home paper bags of food and set them on the counter so we could each take our share and vanish. Sometimes I sat on the grille of the heating vent. Warm air blew around my body. My brother crouched near me, both of us reading.

My father would take a glass of wine and his food and sit in front of the television. We could hear him twisting the dial back and forth to avoid the commercials. My mother sat in the living room near us, reading one of the romances which she devoured like french fries. We read science fiction and fantasy.

“Catherine’s falling,” my brother said.

My mother looked up. The chair angled more abruptly and I was on the floor. The chair was sprawled in front of me. Its back legs had nearly disappeared. I could see the ragged edges of the holes, like mouths forced open by stiff wooden rods.

My mother picked me up. I was crying now. My father pushed his chair back and looked at the floor. He continued to chew.

“That linoleum’s rotten,” he said. “I’ll have to fix it some time this weekend.”

Perhaps that makes him sound like a handyman, a fixer, someone who put things together. He wasn’t. Our house was broken hinges, stuck doors, worn carpets. Rather than take out a broken basement window, he piled dirt on the outside. To insulate it, he said. It made the basement a little darker, but that added to the mystery.

I liked to play there. Behind the furnace, there was a little space like a room. It smelled of house dust, dry air, and whiskey. I found a marble in a corner, amber colored glass. It was scratched in places where it had rolled across the cement floor. It would have been beautiful when it was new. When you held it up to your eye and looked through, everything was different, everything curved and bled together.

I took a half burned white candle from our dining room table down there. It was this which led to the basement being declared off-limits. My mother found the candle and thought I had been lighting it.

I liked having the candle there, in case there was a disaster, a tornado, an explosion, a nuclear bomb. Sometimes it was frightening in the basement. There were holes in the walls that led out in little tunnels and you couldn’t be sure something wasn’t watching you when your back was turned. I stuck the candle in a bottle. There were a lot of bottles down there, piled behind the furnace.

I could see the holes in the ceiling, between two smoke black beams, where the chair legs had gone through. The light from the kitchen came into the basement.

A month went by before the holes were repaired. We avoided the dent in the floor with its two accusing circles. Sometimes I imagined I felt the floor soften beneath my feet elsewhere in the kitchen and quickly stepped sideways. My brother and I watched each other when we were in the same room, as though afraid one might disappear and leave the other here alone.

Finally my father called a man in a blue hat, who came and tapped mysteriously in the basement. My brother and I sat up above, crosslegged on the floor, and watched the linoleum smooth itself out as he replaced the boards. The holes remained.

In the other room, my father watched a golf tournament. We could hear his breathing and sharp grunts whenever a putt rolled smoothly across the grass, heading into the hole like a ball with a purpose. When the man came up, my father offered him a beer and had my mother write out a check.

We went out to Happytime Pizza that night. The restaurant was clean; there were no holes in the floor. The windows were diamonds of colored glass, lead running like angry veins between them. The sunlight came through them and painted my father’s face with red and dark blue.

I reached my hand into a patch of green lying on the table’s surface and then took it out. No one was watching me. My mother and father held the menu between them. There was a wet ring on the wood of the table from my father’s beer glass. I put my hand into the color again and moved it back and forth, letting the light paint my hand as though smoothing it with color.

My brother kicked me gently under the table and moved his hand into the green too. We held our hands on either side of it, letting the very edge of the color bleed onto our hands, not daring to move in.

I recently posted in a Reddit thread about superhero novels and thought that the list I put together there might form an interesting blog post.

Superhero novels are near and dear to my heart for several reasons.

• One, I grew up reading comic books and loved some of them dearly. The only fanfic I have ever written involved the uncanny X-Men and the super villain Arcade, along with a thinly veiled version of myself. It has, luckily, been lost and not recorded for posterity.
• Two, I loved playing superhero RPG’s like Villains and Vigilantes and Champions. Superhero 2044 came out around the same time, but it wasn’t as interesting to my gaming group, which tended to stick with Champions.
• This led in fact to three, which is that I once wrote a novel involving superheroes. I wrote it while in the Masters program in writing at Johns Hopkins. At the time, watchmen had just come out, and the possibilities of superhero literature had not, perhaps we shall say, been realized as effectively as it is today. In fact, I took the book to Tom Disch, who was teaching in the office next to me, and who read a chapter, fixed me with a gimlet eye, and asked, “but why bother?” Several publishing houses looked at the novel and felt it was well written but not commercial. Some time later, tragically, the manuscript was lost in the course of moves. Its heroes can be found in a short story which appeared in Strange Horizons, Ms. Liberty Gets a Haircut, which can also be found in story collection Near + Far. Other superhero stories by me appear in Corrupts Absolutely and Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight

So here’s some of my favorites:

From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain by Minister Faust is awesome superhero fiction. It’s told by the therapist of a superhero team that closely resembles the Avengers. Faust also has The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad.

Count Geiger’s Blues by Michael Bishop is amazing. Along the same lines is Bishop’s Brittle Innings, the story of a baseball playing monster.

The Wild Cards series edited by George R.R. Martin (of GoT fame) is tons and tons of fun and there are a LOT of them for those of us who like to read at a fast and furious clip.

In Hero Years I’m Dead by Michael Stackpole is terrific along with Once a Hero. I wish Stackpole would write more in this world.

Carrie Vaughn After the Golden Age is told from the point of view of the unpowered daughter of a pair of superheroes, Captain Olympus and Spark.

Playing for Keeps by Mur Lafferty.

Austin Grossman’s Soon I Will Be Invincible is told from alternating experienced villain and novice hero viewpoints.

Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a classic.

The Sugar Frosted Nutsack by Mark Leyner is, like all of Leyner’s books, hysterical, but this time with superheroes.

Those Who Walk in Darkness by John Ridley is the beginning of a series that I found reminiscent of joint online project Shadow Unit, created by Elizabeth Bear, Holly Black, Leah Bobet, Emma Bull, Sarah Monette, and Will Shetterly.

Nobody Gets the Girl by James Maxey. Series.

Evil Genius by Catherine Jinks is YA superhero fantasy.

Karma Girl by Jennifer Estep is frothy and funny and sweeps you along in a nicely satisfying story. First of a series.

Along the same lines is Black and White, the story of a superhero and a supervillain friendship by Jackie Kessler and Caitlin Kittredge. First in a series.

Santa Olivia by Jacqueline Carey (also known for her Kushiel adult epic fantasy series) is the story of a group genetically engineered for superpowers. First of a series.

If you want something that goes back to some of F&SF’s roots, try Doc Savage or A Feast Unknown by Philip Jose Farmer.