dale bridges

The Villain

by Dale Bridges

(Originally published in Transgress Magazine)

It started out as an argument over who was going to be the hero and who was going to be the sidekick. Obviously, we both wanted to be the hero. I mean, we’d read all the comic books, watched all the cartoons, we knew how it worked. The hero got the girl and the sidekick got the shaft. It was a necessary arrangement but in the beginning neither of us wanted to take on Boy Wonder duties. We argued about it a lot, usually over Grand Slams at Denny’s, but there was just no way to prove who was really dominant. Tommy had the telekinetic powers but I had the super strength plus these bad-ass laser eyes that could melt through steel. I argued that I should be the hero because I had two powers and that was twice as many powers as Tommy. But Tommy didn’t see it that way. So when we went out on patrol that first night, the whole hero-vs.-sidekick thing was still kind of up in the air and I think we both wanted to prove that we were hero material and perhaps we got a little over zealous and that’s probably why we ended up chasing after the guy in the dark alley even though he hadn’t really done anything criminal-ish and I caught up to him first because I have the super strength so I could take these huge leaping jumps and I ran him down really easy and tossed him up against a brick wall and that’s when I saw that he was dressed like a homeless man and he probably wasn’t even a bad guy after all. I was about to help him to his feet and apologize for the misunderstanding when Tommy came up behind me and just sort of squashed the guy’s head with his mind. There was blood everywhere mixed with chunks of brain matter and Tommy said it looked like scrambled eggs and ketchup, which it sort of did but he still didn’t need to say it, and then he laughed. I started to cry and vomit at the same time. Tommy told me to stop being such a pussy and to check the guy’s pockets to see if he had any money. He didn’t. Afterward, Tommy told me to pick the guy up and carry him out to the desert and bury him where no one would ever know. So that’s what I did.

And that’s when I realized that I was definitely the sidekick, but Tommy was not going to be the hero.