Today’s
Prompt: It’s your 18th birthday and, upon it, your parents deliver some pretty
shocking news: You’re not really human. They admit that they’ve been covering
up the fact that you are actually a (fill in the blank). After hearing the news
you still decide to go to school, but this school day is different than all
your school days past, especially when it’s revealed to others what you truly
are.
— Courtesy: WritersDigest.Com
Word
Count: 1,406
“I
can’t make things pop out of thin air if that’s what you’re thinking.”
I could feel their eyes crawling all over
me like a million needles and pins.
“So
what exactly do you do, then?” Alicia asked.
“Maybe,
he can spin a web like Spiderman.”
Rebecca suggested.
There were a few giggles after that last
statement.
“Well…”
I said.
“Maybe,
he can dance standing on his head.” That was Dick.
This announcement was followed by an
uproar.
“I’ve
not really attempted that one but yeah, I think, maybe, I could if I gave it a
try,” I said.
“Don’t
think. Just do it,” Dick said.
“You
don’t think before breathing, do you?” Rebecca.
“Or
before falling in love,” said a kid with a low punk haircut whom we called
Groovy.
That got everybody in the classroom
roaring with laughter. Even Amen, my best buddy, was slamming his fist into his
desk again and again bellowing a belly laugh.
“Sshhhh…..”
And the silence held sway for a moment.
Just then some kid in the front seat
flung a ball made from crumpled paper at me. I caught if off the air and made a
paper aircraft out of it in the space of 5 seconds and tossed it. It glided in
an arc round the room and returned to me. I snatched it out of the air.
The silence weighed down on my eardrums
like a dead weight. I felt the eyes of the entire class trained on me. As far
as I was concerned, I knew I had done something awesome but if you asked me to
create a chemical formula to explain the process, you’d be barking up the wrong
tree.
“Dude,
how on earth did you do that?” Dick whose eyes bulged with surprise asked.
“I
didn’t think. I just did it,” said I.
“Do
it again,” Shorty said.
“I
can’t.” I lied. “I don’t know how it happened.” Which was true. “Reflexes, I
guess.” Which was both the truth and a lie.
“Reflexes,
my butt,” said Ukwak (/who quack/) who we called Steel (which was the English
word for his name to begin with). He was the biggest kid in class. He stepped
to the front of the class and stepped up to me. He threw a one-two punch to my
mid-section but I was the wind and got out of his way before he pulled the
first punch. He wasn’t expecting it and lost his balance. He slammed his bulk
into the chalk board and crumpled to the floor in a heap. I walked up to him
and picked him up with one hand, my left hand. But that isn’t the issue. I’m a
leftie, anyway. He weighed a ton and for me to have picked him up in front of
all those kids the way I did… I wasn’t some skinny wimpy kid but then I wasn’t
your regular muscles. I was a normal
guy who fulfilled the basic dietary obligations but Steel was huge in every implication of the word. I
felt my classmates’ jaws drop to the floor.
Today’s my 18th birthday. It’s the day
every ideal I ever stood for got threatened. My parents just broke the news to
me that I ain’t exactly human. And that means I’m not family. That’s how I see
it, though. They didn’t exactly spit it out on such terms. They just said I
wasn’t really their kid; I was the product of some weird experiment. Something
that happened probably, eighteen years from date and which they both
participated in. they used to be scientists, they said. But things changed.
They don’t regret having me as their kid and they don’t see any critical
consequences in my future. “You can’t go to school, today,” they said. “You
might be made the butt of their joke; that can damage your personal confidence
forever.”
“But
we live in a different age; a time that’s the opposite of what yours used to be
even though it is a spin-off of that Dark Age, we have learned and thrived
where you and your generation have failed.”
And that’s how I picked up my bag and
strolled off to school. As they had predicted, this school day was totally
different but my parents would never have believed what happened if they didn’t
know lying wasn’t my thing.
Rumor,
being what it is, had gone ahead of me and spilled its guts to the entire
school. I was up to my neck in questions before I made the school gate. Confusion
is nothing new. I set myself to be at my best when I was confronted officially. Standing in front of my
classmates and taking all these tests is just the beginning of the journey. As
sure as word spreads like wild fire, the whole school would be made aware of my
abilities before school day is out. I’m thinking it might mean goodbye to a
formal education. But then again, who can say for sure?
When I turned 18, all my senses plus one got
heightened. There I stood in front of my classmates as the object of their
attention and I dared not say no to their requests.
“Hey!
Clay, catch this!” and three boys, Ron, Mike, and Akam tossed three items all
to the front of the class but at different angles. I darted from corner to
corner snatching stuff out of the air by the time I got to the third object, it
almost touched the floor. Akam had aimed low. It was his mobile phone.
“What
were you thinking,” I said. “I could have missed.”
“You
didn’t,” Akam said, grinning like the smirk was plastered on his face.
“So,
what are you going to do if you got someone killed running around with all that
power?”
I hadn’t really thought about that before
then and the question hit me like blow aimed at my crotches.
“I’m
not gonna kill anybody, Sarah, okay?”
“Can
you fly, Clay?” Janis was the class’ reporter and she looked every bit of it
with the pen and paper on her desk and she throwing the question with her officious voice.
“If
I put my back to it, maybe, I can.”
“But
what if you accidentally off
somebody, Clay, what do you think they’d do to you?” That was Sarah again.
“For
starters, my creators programmed Asimov’s
Three Laws of Robotics into me.”
“So,
you’re saying we got nothing to be scared of?”
“Does
that make you a robot?”
“No,
what I am is a Golem. Asimov coined the word, my creators used it.” I fetched a
marker and scrawled on the board. “By Asimov’s standards,” I said and then
scribbled this: robot = machine +
computer.
“A
‘goal ‘em’ what in the world does
that mean?” That was Janis.
I scribbled the word on the board
G-O-L-E-M. It’s an Hebrew word for ‘unformed
substance’. Quoting Asimov, ‘A clay
object, no matter how much it might resemble a human being is an unformed
substance (the Hebrew word for it is
‘Golem’).” The scientist, Carver Washington invented an organic malleable
substance, that possessed the ability to stretch and reshape itself like the
human body but since he couldn’t breathe
life into it, he called it Golem. I
was formed out of that substance.”
“How
did you get the life then?” Janis again.
“Somebody
took up Asimov on his fictional positronic
brain and succeeded in creating a computerized brain that could function on
its own with little or no human interference and that was the making of me. I
guess I’m different from a robot because I’m not all machine but in some weird
sense, flesh and computer; a Golem. I hope you guys don’t hate me for
what I am?”
“Hate
you, seriously, dude?” It was Steel. “The world can use a real superhero for a change.”
With the entire classroom matched round
and gave me the right hand of fellowship or the right hug of fellowship depending on gender of who was involved.
See, times have changed. If Superman was alive today he’d be a real
hero, loved by everyone. We are the generation who think queer is cool. We grew
up with simulated computer games, and science fiction flicks, we grew up with comics. We are fully aware of our
potentials and we welcome and embrace change. Who are we exactly?
We
are The Comic Book Generation.
Eneh
Akpan
June
3rd, 2014
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