Superman

When Grace was five years old she fell in love with a boy who thought he was Superman. He refused to wear anything that wasn’t red or blue or white, even though at five white so quickly became brown with the dirt of learning to walk like a man. By the time he was ten he held himself straighter than the gum tree in the park, which they would sit under to talk about the flying and the line between right and wrong. At fifteen, he told Grace that he wanted to change his name because face it, he never knew his parents anyway, and their replacements had others now, miracle babies born in tubes. At eighteen, Clark asked Grace to go with him to the city, and get out of this back-water town with its single room picture theatre and its video rental store with barely enough movies to get by and all the people who were sick of hearing him talk about superheroes. But at twenty-five, when the illusion of super powers was finally fading, he held in his hands a baby, with pale skin, eyes like his favourite patch of sky, and hair lit red with the passion and product of love, and felt like Superman all over again.