The secret origin of Kid Autumn

[jack_babalon]

The stairs creak under my steps and it sounds like an old ship swaying on the waves. I'm going down into the basement where all our ghosts live: The Old Captain, The Weeping Woman who smells of Roses & even the pale little boy who sits outside my window at night, scratching at the pane, trying to get in. But this is also the safe place for me. This is where I go when my parents are fighting, not so much to hide but to be quiet really. Down here where the stone walls are always cold, down here where the dampness soaks the air & the bulb flickers ochre, so you know what light would look like if light could get sick. This is where my father paints & my mother dances to a stereo the size of a small ottoman. This is where my family stores all the things we don't want to see but seem to keep. Black plastic garbage bags overfilled with molded photos, refugee memorys, a composite heap built out of frozen moments forgotten. Then there's the slowly collapsing shelves with rows of dusty yellowed pages: The uniforms of every army can be found here, the lost strategys of Generals gambits are down here, there are spy novels cloaked between the field guides of haunted houses & the poetry of dead men. When you open the books there is an outline in the dust, a clean space where presence has become absence. Down here the cockroaches scatter across my fathers painting desk. I have a daydream in my head where his Renaissance soliders & Napoleonic infantry battle the armies of the cockroach king. This is also where we do our laundry though the dryer doesn't work, so there are always piles of dirty clothes clustered between the cushion bags of rotting photos. Down here is where the boiler sits and the rattle of the radiator to me is how the ghost family tried to talk to us. But down here is where my family stored all the comic books. There is an old refridgerator from the late 50's that sits in a side room of the basement. Open the refridgerator and there you'll see thousands of thousands of superhero comics. Not plastic bagged. Not alphabetized. Not in sequential order. These comics weren't for collecting, they were for lonely little boys to read after the horror days of PS 21. They were for folding back the covers and reading over pizza pie dinners or to be stained by drops of milk across splash page battles. Sometimes when I was down there and it was raining or too cold to go outside I would invent my own superheros and run around in imaginary battles killing them off one by one until only my favorites remained: Dragon Commando, Weapon Maiden, American Man & The Vapor. Stupid little kid heroes drawn with color pencils on sheets of copier paper my parents would steal from their jobs. Odd little epics would spill out of my sugar high, with all action and no angst, because when you're a kid the real world is vice versa until it's just vice.

It was on one of those of sad, perfect days that Kid Autumn was born. Sitting down there with my three dogs and probably the three ghosts, an old Villains & Vigilantes rule book in my lap that he appeared.
Exposed to a radioactive break-up, our hero is given the ability to destroy anything he touches... KID AUTUMN THE ENTROPY ACE IS HE MAN...OR MENACE?!?!!. ISSUE#11 PRISONER OF THE ANTI-INFINITE. Yellowed pages. Swiped Kirby artwork. Little thought ballons that look like baby clouds that rain secret words only you and the protagonist can 'hear'. Bad guys who always talk in the third person. Kid Autumn was a message from my future, a time travel SOS in a bottle that landed on the shores of my 12 year old imagination and retranslated into the zeitgeist of my interests.

I remembered Kid Autumn this morning. A shipwreck survivor from a story I never wrote, an unfinished character who has fought his way from my subconscious to demand why I abandoned him. I can see now that the cold is finally coming like a forgotten promise, coming now that she's gone and the world is so beautiful this morning, bittersweet pretty & heartbreak lovely. Gusts of wind have cleaned the dust off the skies, the leaves have fallen along the driveways forming a crunching carpet, the air has the smell of the last embers of fireplaces & a sweater feels snug against the chest almost like a second layer of skin. I pass the test. I walk by and not look at her window. It's just me now and i'm no kid anymore.