Will Musgrove
I drove three hours to my hometown because I couldn’t handle never being able to read my comic books again. Otherwise, “They’re going in the trash, son.” With Mom gone, a mountain of medical bills was forcing Dad to downsize. “I don’t need all this space,” he’d said on the phone earlier that day, me imagining him shrinking into a speck as he walked from room to room.
The boxes of my comics were sitting on the kitchen table when I arrived. Fingering through them, I asked, “Shouldn’t I have some say in this?”
“Why? You don’t live here.”
Behind Dad, lines marked my height at different ages. Above the last line: “Greg, age 14.” I wondered if the person who’d bought my childhood home would paint over the line or forever leave 14-year-old me there on the drywall. Maybe they had their own kid, would start their own chart.
“Well, I grew up here.”
I paused on an issue of Spider-Man. When I was sixteenish, Dad had caught me pretending to be the Web-Head. Most kids that age are sneaking out to parties. I was still trying to stick to walls, clinging to the fog of youth, when just saying what you wanted to be was enough, no matter how ridiculous. I’ve ended up selling insurance, and no one wants to pay for insurance when a superhero might save you for free.
“Now you’re grown,” Dad said, following me out to my car, where I loaded the boxes into the back seat. “You came all this way. How about we get a bite?”
“I have a lot of work waiting for me.”
I lied because I felt guilty. All I owned were the printed-like-crazy issues from the 90s. The superheroes on the covers looked the same as the superheroes on the expensive ones from the 60s, but the comics had drastically lower monetary values. I couldn’t come to the rescue. I couldn’t sell a few and go, “Here, this should be enough so you don’t have to move into that dinky apartment across town.”
On my way back, I passed my hometown’s water tower and thought of a recent flood claim that’d been denied. Like Dad, the customer had lost everything. I glanced back at my comics. “When I grow up, I want to be a superhero,” I said, turning my car around. The 14-year-old etched on the kitchen wall still had a chance to be a hero. I was the alter ego. Somehow we’d gotten separated long ago.
I parked next to the water tower and got out. After hopping the security fence, I went up. At the top, the whole town seemed small. I tried and failed to shoot webbing from my wrist, so instead I found my childhood home on the horizon and placed a palm underneath it. Holding it there, I imagined a tiny version of me having lunch with a tiny version of my dad, imagined telling him that everything was going to be okay, imagined saving the day.
Will Musgrove is a writer and journalist from Northwest Iowa. He received an MFA from Minnesota State University, Mankato. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Florida Review, Wigleaf, Pinch, The Cincinnati Review, The Forge, Passages North, Tampa Review, and elsewhere. Connect on Bluesky at @willmusgrove.bsky.social or at williammusgrove.com.
Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash