Shane Rockenstein Carlson
Professor Brown
INT 36BH
13 September 2020
Scars
It was on the sixth anniversary of his father’s death that Dylan Green first felt a splitting headache right in the center of his forehead. He woke up with the pain throbbing in his mind and could barely tell his mother that he couldn’t go to school. Dylan laid in bed all day, occasionally falling into a dreamless sleep and waking up sweating and still in pain.
He had a hunch as to what the cause was. He’d seen TV news anchors discuss it in between stories of one of the Enhanced stopping a crime. They always felt the need to explain how the Enhanced got their powers even though it seemed that half the world knew about it from personal experience by now. It always began in kids, teenagers, or young adults, and it always started with pain, often a terrible headache or cramps, and led to involuntary expressions of whatever their powers would be. One guy disappeared in the middle of a Chemistry test in his high school. A pair of twins in Ireland lifted off the ground and got stuck on the ceiling of their room, unable to come down until their headaches subsided in the middle of the night while they slept. Some kid driving on the freeway suddenly shapeshifted into a rhinoceros, crushing his car from the inside.
Dylan’s suspicions were confirmed when his bed lifted off the ground, coinciding with a great strain on his mind. He immediately spoke to his mother about it, not realizing he was conversing with her from his room to the grocery store and only with his mind.
He kept it secret from everyone except Michelle, his mother. He returned to school the next week, blaming his absence on a bad cold when someone asked. He only got a suspicious look from his classmate Jennifer, but he couldn’t meet her eyes, as much as he tried.
But that wasn’t the only reaction. He could hear snickering from across the room when he had explained away his absence. It was a regular occurrence, actually, that Jack and Henry would laugh at Dylan whenever he said anything. They found him, with his quietness, an easy target on which to take out their aggression. Dylan was used to being called “faggy”, “queer”, and “homo” in the halls by those two. He tried to pay them no mind, but that didn’t seem to stop anything. The only thing that could was changing his personality in its entirety, which Dylan was less than wont to do, to say the least.
Dylan watched the news when he returned home. There was another story about some Enhanced with weather powers stopping a robbery by snatching the would-be robbers up in a tornado and delivering them directly to police custody.
As he watched absentmindedly, he thought about his father. Dylan wondered what he would say if he was there right then. He remembered a time, only a few months before he was taken from this earth, when they had been watching an old Batman movie together and his father said, “He’s got the right idea, but he’s going about it the wrong way.”
Dylan had turned to his father and asked, “What do you mean?”
His father sighed. “Just beating those guys up doesn’t change anything. You know what does?” His father turned to look at Dylan. “Understanding that those criminals he’s beating up are just people like him.”
Dylan thought he understood what he had meant, but he came to a different understanding now. He realized for what he had to use his powers
*
The next night, he took the car out and went for a drive. He had gotten his hands on his father’s old police scanner, as for some reason either his precinct had never asked for it back or his mother was able to hide it from them. He was maneuvering down one street, taking a left turn here, maybe going straight here, not going anywhere in particular, while listening to the scanner.
Foreign numbers and codes came through in harsh tones through the scanner. There were 10-66s, 10-67s, 240s, 459s, and other confusing codes. Dylan noted multiple 148s, which seemed to coincide with reports of Enhanced stopping crimes.
He parked the car on an empty street and unlocked his phone. He looked up police codes and checked a few that he had remembered.
Through the scanner, a voice announced, “We’ve got a 212 in Samson Park. Repeat, 212, Samson Park. Requesting an officer immediately.”
Dylan scrolled through the webpage and found a listing for 212: “Illegal use of drugs.” He turned the ignition on, took a deep breath, and said to himself, “10-4”.
The car came to a halt outside a dark park, the darkness only broken every few feet around the perimeter by the orange glow from the street-lamps. In a particularly shadowy corner of the field, Dylan could just barely see two large figures huddled close together. He rolled the car window down before shutting off the ignition and focused on listening intently to their conversation.
He could hear quite plainly, as if he was right next to them, their discussion, which focused on payment for the ongoing deal. Dylan knew he didn’t have much time, so he opened his door and slunk out. He stayed low to the ground, his knees creaking as he stepped one foot at a time over to a bush at the right of the park’s entrance.
He watched as the figure on the right handed a rectangular stack to the other, who immediately shoved it into his jacket pocket. As the left hand figure reached into the back pocket of his jeans, Dylan shuttered his eyes and concentrated on the lamppost nearest to them. He could see it in his mind. He reached out and grabbed the bulb. It burnt his hand, but it didn’t hurt. He twisted the bulb, and it shined brighter. He then reached around the cold, solid metal of the lamppost’s neck. Dylan bent the neck up, shining the light onto the figures.
“What the hell?”
Dylan opened his eyes and saw the figures shining in light nearly as bright as daylight. The one on the left had an arm outstretched, a rolled-up brown paper bag in his hand, and the rightmost figure had both hands out to receive it. They stared at the light, a look of bewilderment on their newly-illuminated faces.
Dylan stood up and began marching toward them. They started to run away. Dylan, closing his eyes, reached out in his mind and saw his hands grow to enormous size. He stretched his arms out and wrapped his oversized fingers around each of their waists. He opened his eyes to see them running in place, some invisible force stopping them from moving forward.
He sent a thought from his mind to theirs, a headache starting to ripple in the middle of his brain as he did so.
They heard, loud and clear, “Stop running. I’m not here to hurt you.”
One figure, the dealer, shouted back, “You would say that!”
Dylan sent another wave their way, saying, “I’m not just saying it, literally. I just want to talk.”
The dealer kept running against the invisible hands, but the druggie stopped and turned back to face Dylan.
Dylan was now merely a few yards away. The druggie spoke aloud, “What do you mean, ‘you want to talk’? You’re an Enhanced! Aren’t you supposed to just beat us to shit?”
Dylan softly chuckled. “No, I want to help you. We don’t have much time before the cops get here,” he spoke in both their minds.
Now the dealer turned toward him. “You mean you’re not with them?”
“No.”
“So…you looking to buy?”
Dylan scoffed. “Not that either. Speak to me, tell me why you have to do this.”
The dealer became very small, the shame palpable. “What else am I gonna do? I ain’t got a real job.” He rose up, an anger in his eyes. “I made one mistake, got put in the hole ‘cause of it, and now I have to keep making the same mistake because no one wants to give an ex-con a job!”
The druggie was shaking. “I don’t wanna go to jail, man. This was a mistake. I’m getting out of here!” The druggie began running away from both of them.
A crack in the air burst through the silent night as a blue ball of light crashed to the ground. All three of them beheld a tall figure, clad in dark blue, rise from the ground and stand, a red glow in his eyes. The figure turned to Dylan and bellowed in a low baritone voice, “Thanks, but I’ll take it from here.”
Then he smacked the druggie in the face, knocking him to the ground feet from the dealer.
“Fuck this!” the dealer exclaimed and bolted the other way.
Sirens screeched, and a pair of cop cars swung into the parking lot of the park. Cops exited the vehicles and stood behind the opened doors, guns drawn.
The dealer slowed, his arms in an outstretched shrug, and turned back to Dylan. “You set me up!”
Dylan cried aloud, “No, I swear I didn’t!”
The tall blue figure put a hand on Dylan’s shoulder and said, “That’s enough. You’ve done your part.”
Dylan turned to the man and said, “We have to help them. We can’t just beat them! That won’t change anything!”
The man clicked his tongue and shook his head. “You did good, kid, but you’ve got it all wrong. You’ll learn. You’ll be a great hero one day, son.” The man then turned his head up, grabbed the druggie by the collar, and sauntered off toward the cop cars. Dylan watched after him, a pit in his stomach eating himself from the inside.
*
The next week marked barely a change for Dylan. He continued to go to school as if everything was normal, but at night, he would patrol the streets, trying to intervene in ongoing criminal activity. And every time, he was stopped by the cops or other Enhanced or, more often, both.
Dylan told his mother after the first night what he was doing. She tried to turn him against it, reminding him how his father’s life ended with a fatal gunshot in the line of duty, but Dylan told her it was his duty.
Michelle watched him with wet eyes. “You’re just like your father, always thinking about others,” she said, her voice cracking.
Dylan hugged her, his chin resting on her shoulder. “I try my best, Mom.”
“I just want you safe,” she said between sobs, “but I also want you happy. And I know that if you don’t do this, it’ll eat you. It did to your father whenever he was away from his work.”
They stayed that way for a while, as if Michelle was trying to hold hostage the little boy Dylan once was.
*
Dylan had noticed Jennifer paying attention to him in class. He wondered if this was a new occurrence or if it had been ongoing without his knowledge until he received his powers. Whenever he spoke aloud in class, he felt her eyes on him. At lunch, he’d sometimes spot her walk into the building in which he ate, stop and look at him for a second, then continue on to wherever she actually needed to go. He didn’t mind. As a matter of fact, he had been doing similar things to her for a few months.
On that Friday, Dylan saw her at lunch and made up his mind. He stood up and walked to her. Seeing him coming towards her, she anxiously nodded her head this way and that in fake absentminded staring at random spots around her.
“Hey,” Dylan said as he came within earshot of her, “could I talk to you real quick outside?”
Jennifer looked back to him and met his eyes. “Sure.”
They exited the building and stopped in a corner outside it next to a scrawny grey sapling supported by two wooden posts. Dylan observed her for a second, making sure he knew the right words to say. He had never done this before.
“So, I was wondering if maybe you might like to go out some time?” he asked, the confidence of his words shaken by a hiccupping crack on the word “wondering”.
Jennifer chuckled slightly. Her hand came up to her face to set the sides of her blonde hair back against the wishes of the wind. “Uh, yeah, I think I’d like that.”
Dylan smiled, a flame of energy lighting his face in a light red color.
So they exchanged phone numbers and set up a date. When Dylan returned to his lunch, he felt a faint glimmer of hope, the kind of which he hadn’t felt in years.
*
That night, a spring in his step and his head raised high, Dylan took up his patrol. The open window whipped his dark hair as he drove. He sometimes sang along with the song on the radio, paying no heed to whoever could hear.
He arrived at the scene of a 211, that is, a robbery. It was a wide grey brick building with a large red sign at the top denoting it as a bank. There were only a handful of cars parked outside. Dylan wondered if the robbers had planned this so their robbery would have as few witnesses as possible. Most importantly to Dylan, no cops were in the parking lot yet.
He snuck out of the car and stopped by the corner of the large outside window, still in the shadows. He saw inside two men in black clothing and black hoods carrying large pillowcases and aiming guns at bank tellers as the tellers reached into the drawers of their registers to pull as much cash out as possible.
Dylan knew he had to act fast so no one would get hurt. He closed his eyes and saw the two in his mind. He pulled a net out of thin air and threw it over one of the robbers. While holding the net down in the left hand of his mind, Dylan turned his attention to the other robber. He conjured two metal shoes and placed them over the robber’s feet.
Dylan opened his eyes to see the leftward robber stuck on the ground, an invisible weight holding his chest down, and the rightward robber stuck standing in place, unable to move his feet.
He stood up, paced over to the door, and let himself in. Part of his mind still concentrated on holding the net and visualizing the metal shoes, but he allowed another part of his brain to reach out to the brains of the robbers. “I won’t do anymore to hurt you if you tell me what I can do to help you,” he spoke telepathically. “Don’t speak, just think it. I’ll be able to hear it.”
The robbers shared a confused look to each other. He heard one think, “The fuck is this guy on about?”
“I heard that,” Dylan thought back, as cheekily as he could make his thoughts sound.
The robbers both eyed Dylan with fear, though the other robber asked aloud, “Heard what?”
Dylan surveyed the room and saw the tellers staring at him with a mix of fear and expectancy. “The cops are on their way, this’ll all be over soon,” he said to comfort them.
A cacophony of distressed thoughts rang through the robbers’ brains and, by extension, Dylan’s brain. He thought to himself, “God, I wish they’d calm down!”
Both their minds went as silent.
Dylan looked at them. He asked in both their minds, “Why did you both stop?”
They both answered. “We heard you tell us to calm down.”
Dylan wondered for a second. He knew he hadn’t projected that thought into their brains, so how had they heard it?
He pushed the thought aside for now. “I know,” Dylan thought at them, “that being arrested is frightening, and I’m not going to bullshit you with another, ‘You should have thought of that before committing a crime,’ speech. There’s nothing I can do to stop what is going to happen. But wouldn’t you both like to have just one more person on your side? If so, then please just talk to me.”
Dylan stared at them, hoping he had convinced them. The robbers looked to each other, then back to Dylan. Then they began speaking to him aloud, telling them what had led to their decision to commit a robbery, which was quite similar to what Dylan had expected. They were very poor and had no other prospects. They spoke quickly, knowing that they needed to get their full story out before the cops arrived.
When the cops did arrive, they went quietly and without a fight. There was a shame on their faces as they exited the bright lobby of the bank. After they left, Dylan turned to the bank staff and few witnesses and said, “You guys heard all that, right?”
*
The succeeding weeks passed similarly. After his major breakthrough, Dylan found much more success in his nightly patrols. He found himself talked about on the news, which didn’t make his mother happy.
But he seemed to be helping. The robbers from his breakthrough patrol had both pleaded guilty and been able to get a far-reduced sentence. And similar occurrences were happening with all the cases in which he had been involved.
Dylan was also successful in his personal life. He and Jennifer had been on three dates, which all went swimmingly. He learned that she played piano, was planning on studying chemistry, and went to the church up the street from his house. He also learned that she had a mind like his, as they had talked about recent events with regards to an “unknown Enhanced vigilante” who was actually Dylan.
“I’m happy we have someone like him,” Jennifer said over dinner on their second date. “At least, I keep hearing it’s a him.”
“I’m pretty sure it’s a him,” Dylan said with a smile.
“Yeah. Well, I think, with all these guys running around and beating these at-risk individuals to a pulp, we need someone who takes the time to talk to them like human beings!”
“I’m totally with you on that.”
Outside of their dates and their time together, Dylan particularly reveled in being able to combat the constant homophobic insults from Jack and Henry at school. After their first date, Dylan heard them jeering him in the hallway. Against his better judgment, he turned to them and said, “You can’t really say that anymore. I have a girlfriend.”
Jack had scoffed. “Oh, yeah? Where’s she from, Canada?”
“Nope. She’s from here. Actually, she’s right there.” And Dylan pointed across the hall, to where Jennifer was standing, talking to a few of her friends. She spotted him and smiled and waved, to which Dylan responded in kind. He turned back to Jack and Henry, who stared at him wide-eyed before shifting down the hall, muttering to each other about how “that fag” must have hired her to pretend to be his girlfriend.
Dylan smiled. Things were good.
*
One night, when Dylan stopped a home burglary, he tried to get the burglar to talk, but the burglar refused.
“Come on, I want to help. Please let me help you,” Dylan projected into the burglar’s mind, but the burglar remained silent.
When the cops escorted the burglar to the car, he turned his head back to Dylan and gave a wretched smile. The only thing Dylan heard him say that night was: “Bye, Dylan! Say ‘hi’ to your mom for me!”
Dylan stared after him as the cops drove off. He tried to think if he recognized the burglar’s face and if they had met before, but he felt sure that he had never seen him, not even in passing. He thought he would recognize him, as the burglar had a distinct dark scar over his right eye, stretching from his temple to just above his top lip. He replayed their conversation in his mind to see if he had accidentally let his name slip, but he knew he hadn’t. “So why did he know my name?” he wondered.
*
The next night there was a breakout from the prison. Only one prisoner escaped. Dylan didn’t arrive in time, so he just continued on his patrol.
An hour later, Dylan heard the police scanner announce, “We’re getting reports of a 459…” Dylan knew 459 meant burglary, especially given the burglary he had stopped the night before. He listened closely to hear the location.
“…at 242 Hare Drive.”
Dylan’s body went still, and his hairs stood at attention. He listened for a repeat, dreading the possibility that he had heard correctly.
The scanner blared once more, “Repeat, that’s a 459 at 242 Hare Drive.”
242 Hare Drive. That was his address. It was past midnight, so he knew his mother would be asleep.
He slammed his foot on the gas pedal and booked it in the direction of his home, praying for his mother’s safety.
The surroundings passed him in blurs. Other cars fell behind him as he raced down street after street, slipping through the lanes and turning sharp corners. More noise burst from the scanner, but Dylan paid it no attention.
At last, he arrived home. He stopped the car in the driveway and swung the door open. The moonlight reflected against the front door’s glass splayed out on the ground, and the door itself was busted from the inside. He crept into the house. He couldn’t hear anyone still inside, but he kept quiet nonetheless.
A bright column of moonlight was all that illuminated the downstairs. The living room was torn apart, couch cushions thrown haphazardly across the room and drawers pulled out of place. The kitchen was mostly untouched. The door to the backyard was wide open. Dylan snuck to the staircase and stepped, one stair at a time, up to the second floor.
He noticed the trail of blood when he got to the landing. It led from the stairs down the hall and into his mother’s room. Throwing caution to the wind, Dylan rushed into the room.
The moonlight fell on her pale face and her unblinking eyes. A look of shock and fear was frozen on her features. There was a bloody hole in her head, where Dylan guessed a bullet had gone through. The window was open since it had been a warm night and they didn’t have AC. She was on the floor, her limbs sprawled.
Dylan fell to his knees. He held her in his arms. He tried to reach out to her mind to prove everything he was seeing wrong, but her mind made no sound.
He sat there, salty tears streaming down his numb, unfeeling cheeks and falling to his mother’s breast. He heard the radio from the car still playing barely intelligible songs and, after a minute, the sirens from the cop cars as they pulled up to the house, too late to stop the burglar or to save Dylan’s mother.
*
Her funeral was held two weeks later at the church up the street from Dylan’s house. It was the third funeral that Dylan’s grandfather had to plan in the past ten years. He had help the last two times, but none this time.
It was a small affair. Michelle had wanted to be cremated, so a green rectangular urn placed on a small wooden table by the altar was her final resting place until Dylan would sprinkle her ashes at three different places, all places she loved in her life.
Dylan’s grandfather was, of course, heartbroken to see his daughter have her life taken like this, but he was even more torn up at the thought of how alone his grandson now was. That sadness was sated a little by seeing the young blonde girl holding Dylan close at the funeral service.
*
Dylan moved in with his grandfather over the course of planning the funeral. He hadn’t wanted to set foot in his old home ever again since he found his mother, so he had stayed with Jennifer’s family for a few days before his grandfather could take him in. When he went back to pack all his things, he had to do it in trips, taking one bag at a time then sitting outside with a few of the neighbors and Jennifer for fifteen minutes or so before going back in again. Every creak on the stairs, every noise of the house settling, every little sound sent fear running up the length of his spine and activated his fight-or-flight response, as if the killer had returned.
By the day of the funeral, he was settling in to living with his grandfather, but he couldn’t shake a deep fear in the center of his gut that the killer would find him and kill him or, worse, kill the only family he had left. He couldn’t sleep, as hard as he tried; he had to keep the windows closed because he thought that every noise from outside could be the killer, and without any airflow, his room became stuffy and intolerable.
He returned to school after sporadic appearances in the previous two weeks. When he had appeared, he often had to leave before lunch either because of his anxiety or his grief. When he returned for good, he was met with pitiful glances from his classmates and especially his teachers, and he hated it. Before he had been faceless, just another student at a public high school; now his face was known as one that inspired pity in the hearts of his peers. He knew which one he preferred.
He told this to Jennifer, who was taken aback at this. “Dylan, you shouldn’t be embarrassed by people feeling sorry for you,” she said. “They – we all empathize with you, even though hardly any of us know what it’s like to go through what you’re going through.”
“I’m not embarrassed!” Dylan hissed. “I’m angry! I don’t want pity. I just want the person who did this dead!”
Jennifer leaned back, away from Dylan. “You don’t mean that.”
“Yes, I do! And I’m allowed to! The fucker killed my mom! And it’s my fault!”
At this, Dylan put his head in his hands, tears beginning to fall down from his lined, tired eyes. Jennifer put a hand on his shoulder. “Oh, baby, don’t say that.”
But Dylan knew it to be true. The escaped prisoner, the burglary, the brutality of it all; it all matched up. This had been done by the burglar who had refused to cooperate with him the night before his mother’s murder. Somehow, the burglar was able to reach into Dylan’s brain. A sentence came to Dylan’s mind, something that seemed poetic but familiar all the same: “An opened door can be stepped through from either side.” He wondered where he had heard it; maybe a book, maybe “Doctor Who”, who knows. But he knew it was the reason why the burglar was able to find out about Dylan’s name and his life.
Dylan awoke from his introspection at the sound of snickering only a few feet away. He turned his head to face the sound and saw Jack and Henry towering over him as he sat with Jennifer, pointing and laughing.
“Look at the fucking baby crying!” Henry bellowed through his laughter.
“Leave him alone, asshats,” Jennifer chided.
But Dylan just stared at them. His brow furrowed and his eyes glowed with the heat of all the anger in his soul.
Before he could give a second thought to it, he shot up from his seat. In his mind, he visualized striking out at Henry’s neck and gripping it as tightly as he could. In reality, he and all the kids in the building saw Henry lift off the ground and reach for his neck, struggling to breathe.
“Yo, dude, what the fuck are you doing?” Jack shouted.
Dylan’s face filled with a sick joy at the sight of his enemy in pain at his hands. Henry tried to scream, but the sound got clogged in the middle of his throat.
“Dylan, is this you?” Jennifer begged, standing up next to him. “Dylan, stop this! This isn’t you!”
Dylan looked at her and saw the fear in her eyes, the tremble of her chest as she hyperventilated, as if he was choking her instead of Henry. His face darkened. He turned back to Henry and saw water streaming down from his red eyes down his puffy purple face. In his mind, he let him go, and everyone saw Henry fall to the ground.
Henry grabbed his throat, his chest bursting as he returned to his breath. Jack grabbed him around the shoulder and, giving one last fearful look to Dylan, escorted Henry out of the building and as far away from Dylan as they could get.
Dylan turned back to Jennifer. She stood there, her face pallid and white. He saw her eyes well with tears. He muttered, “I couldn’t stop myself.”
Jennifer looked him over one last time and said, “Then I don’t know who you are.” And with that, she turned away and left the building, leaving Dylan standing there in the shadowy corner of the room, beheld by all in the building as something different than they had ever seen before.
*
Dylan committed more and more to his patrols every night. He only had one goal in mind: to find the bastard who ruined his life. He drove mindlessly around the city blocks, only answering calls of 459s over the police scanner.
Every time he came to a burglary, he would check their face for a scar over their right eye, but he hadn’t seen any such scars. After checking the faces, he’d simply toss the burglars out on the street for the police to find, never even considering reaching out to them telepathically.
This is how the next few weeks passed. He paid little attention to his classes. His grandfather saw him pace around the house whenever he was home, barely eating or doing anything productive. With each passing day without finding the burglar, Dylan became angrier and angrier, his eyes gaining more lines underneath and his smile appearing so little that the smile lines that used to be there simply vanished.
There came one night when he heard over the scanner a call for a burglary on his old street, only five houses down from his old one. His heart jumped at the announcement of the location. The adrenaline began to pump through his veins as he rushed the car across several blocks to get there before the police.
Dylan stopped the car right outside the house. He slammed the door shut as he made his way up to the front. He heard noise coming from the back, so he approached the gate on the side of the house and clambered over it.
He heard a voice shushing another. He stood still and waited to hear anything else. When noise returned to the back, quieter than before, Dylan began crawling down the long side path into the backyard.
He peeked his head around the corner to see two men in all black hunched down by the back door, sliding a thin metal sheet into the sliding glass door. He remembered the previous two burglaries: the culprit had entered through the sliding glass door in the back. He saw the destruction of his downstairs and felt the wind pouring through the opened back door from the night he found his mother. He knew he had found him.
Dylan reached out in his mind, grabbed one by the legs, and threw him against the backyard wall. The other turned to Dylan and saw him rush at him, tackling him down to the ground.
Dylan pulled the hood off his face. There was a dark scar stretching from his right temple to his top lip.
The burglar huffed, his heart pounding visibly from his chest. “Dylan,” he breathed, “I’m ready to talk now.”
Dylan smiled a sly smile. “Not this time,” he said. “I don’t feel like talking.”
Dylan’s face fell, and his expression became one of concentration, like he was finishing a task long worked on. He raised a fist and brought it down on the burglar’s face. His knuckles groaned in reply, but Dylan paid it no mind. He raised his other fist and swung it down, hearing the burglar’s nose crack. He kept at it, one fist at a time, feeling pain soak through his own fists from his knuckles to his wrists. His dark hair fell in his face, but he did nothing to reset it, focusing entirely on his work. Blood shot out, staining Dylan’s face and his hair. He saw the skin on his knuckles tear. That would leave a scar.
He kept up, one fist after another, even when the burglar’s chest ceased heaving. He knew that night he would sleep, and it would be dreamless. So he kept going.
*
Artist’s Statement:
This story is a way for me to reflect on masculinity and how a particular, toxic kind of masculinity is almost required by our society. Dylan’s shift from a sensitive, empathetic boy into a cold, violent man is one that many young men go through, since as we grow up, we learn that society does not want men who think of others first and don’t try to one-up everyone in their way. Rather, society wants a specific type of man – a physical, impulse-driven creature who gives no thought to his fellows – and that’s just not the kind of model everyone can or wants to follow. As our society has become more accepting of the different ways femininity can manifest (which is good, though even in this we have much further to go), we seem to have remained in the ‘50s in our understanding of masculinity, and that does not seem to be changing.
The choice of making this a short story based around superheroes comes from two reasons. The first is that superheroes are ripe for dissecting the concept of masculinity. Male superheroes are always big strong men who beat up the bad guys and protect the women and children. There are plenty of superhero stories that criticize this characterization through their own medium, but the creation of many of these characters (Superman, Captain America, Batman, etc.) comes from this place of toxic masculinity. The second is ease. This story actually takes place in the same universe as the novel that I have been working on for several years. My novel is a much different story, as it is much more optimistic and concerned with other themes than toxic masculinity, but this fits into the world I have created quite easily. The only caveat is that this story has to take place after my novel as certain events from the novel must take place to make the world the way it is in this story.
By ending the story the way that I have, I hope to have communicated a theme that is present in one of my favorite Batman stories, “The Killing Joke” (though this theme is contradicted within this story), and many other tales of human tragedy and devolution, from “The Godfather” to the “Star Wars” prequels: that anyone, even the most ethical people, can be corrupted by their environment. In the case of this story, that environment happens to be society, as Dylan’s arc is one of this toxic masculinity being thrust upon him by circumstance. Of course, Dylan’s fall is impacted by his own choices and his naivete, but his innocence is used against him to bring him down to this level. There are a multitude of factors responsible for his corruption, but his treatment by society and the tragedy that befalls him are the factors most at blame.
I hope to have left readers with something to think about. As fantastical as my story is, this is a real issue that needs to be discussed. We can change Dylan’s story if we accept the many different ways individual men can manifest their masculinity, but that takes work. However, as pessimistic as this story is, I truly believe that we can achieve a better world for young men like Dylan.
