#66: Plenty of Free Parking

I don’t know why I tell my sister Avril anything, because she always makes things more complicated.
     I mentioned to her that I desperately wanted to visit our Grandma while she was in Ann Arbor, and to visit my biological father, the Silver Age Megaton Man, and our alternate mama, the Mod Puma, at Megatonic University.
     “Great,” said Avie. “I’ll drive.”
     “No, I just want to fly in and out, real quick,” I said. By myself, was the implication.
     “Nonsense,” said Avie. “Seedy is my Grandma, too, and Alice² is our alternate mama.”
     “I’ll come along,” said Kozmik Kat. “I like the Mod Puma…I like any feline character of the female persuasion.”

#65: At No Fixed Address

“What possible justification could you have for evicting me, on the night before Christmas?” I said, my eyes narrowing at my landlord. “I pay my rent on time. I’m clean, I’m quiet…”
     “Up and down the stairs with your friends all the time,” he replied. “Men, women, all hours. You have some kind of twenty-four hour orgy going on in my attic!”
     The lady on the first floor who listened to fire-and-brimstone radio preachers all the time, I figured, had blown the whistle. I resisted the urge to break my landlord’s jaw in three places, something I was pretty sure I was angry enough to do—even without my megapowers. His words were so completely shocking, it took me a moment to realize his breath was rank with booze.

#64: Edge of Nineteen Eighty-Four

Volume III: Troy

The fall semester of my senior year had ended strongly, and it looked as though the year itself would end on an upbeat note. Moving back to Detroit had been a good move; I had successfully completed my senior thesis on urban cultural theory, and nearly all of the credits in my social planning major had been completed. I was looking forward to a spring semester much like the fall had been. My schedule—mostly electives—would be entirely in the University-Cultural Center, with classes held either at the Arbor State Extension across from the museum or at Warren Woodward University, where I had already taken several cross-listed courses and where I had applied and planned to go to grad school. Except for paperwork, I would have little need to visit Ann Arbor regularly until graduation—which I really looked forward to, because it meant walking in the ceremony with Stella Starlight, my old roommate and almost the first friend I had made there, who would be graduating at the same time.

#63: The Snows of State Fair Avenue

“Wait a minute!” cried Yarn Man. “How do we know it’s really the Silver Age Megaton Man and the Mod Puma the Time Turntable has brought back from another dimension—and not just a couple o’ crummy imposters?”
     The Mod Puma turned and glared at him. “Bing, how would you like the polka dots on your boxers to migrate up to your eyeballs?” Feline-like, she lunged off the turntable and into the snow, executed a few practice karate kicks with her taloned feet, and held her clawed hands stiffly in front of her face, ready to chop.
     Yarn Man grimaced and covered his groin with his red mittens. “That’s the real Mod Puma, all right,” he conceded.
     The psychedelic cat relaxed her stance. “I thought so,” she said.

#62: This Fairground, This Battlefield

I wasn’t wearing my Ms. Megaton Man uniform under my clothes for extra insulation as I usually did this time of year, since I was wearing my nice dress again to visit Mama. So, I had to race back to where Avie had parked her Pacer. There, in the back seat among the groceries and gifts, I had stowed my book bag, just in case. I stripped right there, in the parking lot behind Mama’s apartment building, hoping none of her neighbors happened to be looking out their back windows at just that moment to see her daughter turn into a megahero.