Photos of a Hero: Short Story

Photos of a Hero

Nothing like a little spring cleaning in a superhero's apartment.

Jennifer Delgado, more popularly known as Synapse, hustled through her bedroom, picking up her clothes and shoveling out the trash from under her bed. She grappled an armful of red Chunky Bar wrappers and shoved them into her stuffed garbage can, her face turning red at the idea of her fiancé Ted or anyone else seeing the mess. Chunky Bar had sponsored Synapse months ago, sending her boxes of Chunky Bars and a fat check for wearing a Chunky Bar logo on her cape for a week.

She'd been glad to do it—she loved Chunky Bars, as well as being able to pay her rent. New York apartments weren't cheap. The only reason she was able to help clean up the streets as often as she could was because of sponsors like them.

A couple years ago, her integrity probably would have objected to wearing a logo on her cape. It was one thing to star in a commercial or two, but wearing the logo seemed to taint her hero identity itself.

Times had changed, money was tight.

These days, it wasn't often that her cape was a blank pink cloth. It usually had a collection of logos, arranged like badges on a scout's sash.

And she really had to learn to put things in a trash can instead of kicking them under her bed! Goodness, what would her mom say?

She tugged out a shoebox to see what it was and grinned. Ah, her scrapbooking stuff. Polaroid photos, lace, and rhinestones she had meant to stick in one of the albums gathering dust on her stuffed bookshelves one of these days. Maybe when her fiancé Ted came over in a few hours, she could sucker him into helping her finally put it together.

She frowned as she flipped through the photos, snapping her head up to glance at her memory board. Nah, too full. It was filled with awards from her childhood and collectible cartoon character pins—particularly mermaids. She'd always had a thing with mermaids.

She picked up all of the photos and newspaper clippings, organized them neatly, then got distracted looking through them, the crisp, soft newspaper and too-smooth polaroids creating a variety of textures for her fingertips. She spotted newspaper clipping of her younger days as Synapse, a front-page article with a photo, her black hair tied back in a ponytail and her Latina skin contrasting beautifully with the bright pink of her form-fitting outfit, her cape, and her lipstick.

Those were the days—she hardly had the patience for makeup in costume anymore, unless she was doing a press conference.

In the photo, she was shaking the mayor's hand, eyes bright and smile the biggest it had been since. She'd just saved the Brooklyn Bridge and the people on it from being destroyed by a squid monster.

She missed squid monsters. People were so much worse.

But, she had to do what she had to do, because she was a hero. It was just her job.

She shuffled through the pictures, inhaling the smell of old newspapers indulgently and grinning. She spotted another newspaper clipping of her punching a freeze-ray-weilding gangster in the nose. She still wasn't sure how Ted got that shot—that was back in the day before she started recognizing that cute, snoopy little photographer and started dragging him everywhere. She realized about a year into superhero work that she couldn't just punch and tie up people and let the police take them in. She needed evidence to keep them in jail, which was where snoopy photographers came in handy. It probably helped that she liked him..

She hadn't known it then, but that gangster was a member of the Daggers, a group involved in drug trade and human trafficking. Images burned into her mind forever of exploring the darkest parts of the city, the underground abandoned subway tracks and sewers, the crumbling buildings in the depths of The Bronx, and finding captured women covered in shadows and chains.