Friday, March 29, 2013

Flash fan fiction: A new beginning to Batman

For a year or longer, I've had a Batman idea rattling around in my head. Slowly aching to come out, I tried to think of a way to get such a story to an audience. I was obviously using someone else's characters, so I thought through my blog would be a good way. I wanted to produce about 500 words at a time, but I realized that this would probably be boring and would take a long time to tell a story that's typically told with pictures. My solution is to write different pieces of flash fiction that combine into a longitudinal narrative. In short, the audience has to fill in some of the gaps, but I don't mind that. So, here is the first part to Batman: A new beginning.

Scared. I was always scared. I was just a child, but I could tell it upset my parents. My dad was never afraid, and my mom got by on his strength. I was a boy, but, someday, I would be a man. I knew I needed to overcome my fear. Two years after the fall and the cave, I was still terrified of flying creatures and the darkness. I could see the look of disappointment every time we had to leave a public place because I couldn't handle it. It would be a long time before I learned to embrace those fears. That night, we exited out the back way into an alley. Immediately, I knew something was different, wrong. My father's pace quickened as did my mother's. I raced to catch up. He noticed that he pulled ahead and stopped. I crashed into his side and somehow ended up in front of him, but I didn't even notice him, the man who would change the course of my life.

"Change?" He asked.

My father was a giving man. He reached for his wallet. Mom watched him. I looked at the surprisingly well dressed man. He didn't look homeless. We'd encountered enough homeless people through my father's charity work for this guy to seem suspicious. I saw his hand move, and I moved in front of my dad. My mom was too far away to protect her. My movement startled him. A flash and a bang disrupted the peacefulness of the night, then another. I was on the ground before I realized what had happened. My mom was dead before she hit the ground. My last image of her was with a bullet hole in her forehead. The first bullet nicked my sub-clavicle artery. The doctor, though bleeding profusely from his abdomen, applied pressure on the wound and saved my life along with the help of one Dr. Pennyworth.  I would find out about his death when I woke from a coma three days later.

Police called it a classic mugging, but the man was no mugger. He was never found, either. It'd take 25 years, but I'd find out the truth about that night.

Part 2