The Fiddleback

fiction by Ryan P. Kennedy

 

A super hero team—a husband, his wife, and their dog—stand for hope and cheer in a city beset by freak-show criminals and brilliant saboteurs. They are hailed as saviors but call themselves the Amazing Amazings! A man of super strength, Mr. Amazing received his abilities in his youth from radiation leaking from a broken microwave. A perfectly mediocre woman until her adulthood, Mrs. Amazing absorbed secondhand radiation from her husband after years of lovemaking, and now her hyper-intelligence is surpassed by none. Accompanying the great duo is their dog, the Amazing Retriever, a canine endowed with uncanny loyalty. These three heroes, who defend life and uphold justice, have earned the right to call themselves the Amazing Amazings! Their greatest threats to this day:

Years ago, NFL scientists isolated a group of infants in a gravity chamber four times more powerful than the earth’s pull. After twenty years of training and sprint drills, these men emerged from the gravity chamber faster, stronger, and harder than any athlete around. Together they became the greatest ever football team—until they turned evil! Now known as the Crazy-for-Deaths, the hostile band of athletes kidnapped the world’s referees and hold them atop the world’s tallest building, where they await a response from the Amazings!

Elsewhere, the fifteen-year-old Kid Coma, sworn enemy of the Amazing family, uses powerful telepathy to orchestrate a series of bank heists and sex crimes, despite his being in a coma for eight years. His goons keep him plugged to machines far below the city streets. He is the vilest and youngest of all the archenemies who face the Amazing Amazings!

***

After Mrs. Amazing used her intellect to increase the gravity fourfold, Mr. Amazing rescued the kidnapped referees atop the world’s tallest building by beating up the Crazy-for-Deaths, who had then been reduced to the strength and speed of common men. The referees sentenced the former athletes to a ten-year term in a maximum-gravity penalty box!

Meanwhile, using the increased gravity to her advantage, Mrs. Amazing baked the densest and most succulent cake ever consumed in this dimension. While Mr. Amazing scrubbed the pans with his super strength, his wife negotiated the sale of the recipe to a wholesale baker and distributor. Thus, Crazy-for-Sponge Cake was invented. The Crazy-for-Deaths’ quarterback, QB Hangman, endorsed the cake from the penalty box. As a result, the licensing and merchandising arm of the Amazing Amazings brand recorded one of the team’s highest grossing quarters.

Later, Mr. Amazing forgot to pay the mortgage, causing an argument that he could not win by sheer force. The man of super strength came in later that night drunk and slept on the floor.

***

Big news in the big city: A mysterious company eliminated hunger! Free food flooded the streets and no child wept from starvation. There was, however, one major hitch: Corporations themselves produced and sponsored specific food products. But when citizens consumed those products they felt a powerful urge to go out and buy the corporation’s goods and services! Nevertheless, the city’s politicians legalized gastro-targeting and hailed the mysterious company a champion of the people.

Mrs. Amazing, however, was queerly suspicious.

***

Mrs. Amazing, the world’s smartest woman, also focused her efforts on a dilemma of great personal interest: Why could she not get pregnant?

***

The Amazings celebrated their fifth wedding anniversary, as well as a six-month stretch of peace and happiness, though a string of bank heists and sex crimes still beleaguered the city.

At dinner, Mrs. Amazing looked mega-kissable, and Mr. Amazing posed terrifically for photographs. Even QB Hangman sent the couple an anniversary card but with a drawing of the Amazing Retriever hanged by the neck.

Later that week, the Amazing Amazings maintained order in the big city by meeting challenges head-on, no matter the size! Somewhere, a substitute teacher held back tears. Elsewhere, a serial killer spent 45 minutes in the power saw aisle of a hardware store. At home, their dog chewed up Mr. Amazing’s lava-proof slippers. Whatever the challenge might have been, the Amazing Amazings ensured that this period of peace and happiness continued unabated throughout the city.

***

But not all rested easy during this period of peace! Acting on a hunch regarding the city’s gastro-targeting development, Mrs. Amazing traveled to a replica dimension where she discovered three gargantuan differences between the cities.

First, this was a dimension in which Mr. Amazing did not exist. In this city, the broken microwave left him toothless, not super-powered. A dentist in his adulthood, he instead dedicated his life to fighting gum disease and fixing menacing overbites.

Second, her Crazy-for-Sponge Cake was not the densest or most succulent on the market.

And third, she discovered the mastermind behind the gastro-targeting plot was none other than Kid Coma. Without the Amazings to thwart him, the diabolical comatose teen had turned the powerful urges to buy a corporation’s goods and services into powerful urges to do his evil bidding. In this knockoff dimension, Kid Coma also owned the sun and charged the world for its use of the sun’s rays!

Mr. Amazing, back in our dimension, spent the week alone. But while rescuing the passengers of a capsized tour boat, a super hero team of turbocharged bikini models called the XOXOs flirted with Mr. Amazing, and he flirted back. Back at home he felt no guilt and considered calling one of their mightiest.

***

Using the Amazing Retriever to track Kid Coma, the scourge of the Amazings, to a subterranean chamber before he could enact the next phase in his gastro-targeting scheme in our dimension, the Amazings made short work of the vilest and youngest of their archenemies! Mrs. Amazing’s superlative intelligence allowed them access to his lair without detection! Once inside, Kid Coma marched his goons around with his thoughts, but they were no match for the speed and strength of Mr. Amazing!

Having scotched the vegetable villain’s plot to take over the world, Mr. Amazing looked deep into the eyes of his conquest and posed gallantly. Meanwhile, to keep his telepathic powers out of range of the citizenry, Mrs. Amazing placed Kid Coma in an iron tupperwarium box near the center of the earth where he remains to this day!

By putting an end to Kid Coma’s schemes, the Amazing Amazings also put an end to the mysterious string of bank heists and sex crimes. The key to the city was theirs! Merchandise sales exploded! The mayor granted them a free-hot-dogs-for-life card, redeemable at any of the city’s street vendors.

But secrets remained unknown! The Amazing Amazings were not without their weaknesses. Mr. Amazing’s body, though a specimen of marvelous speed and invincible strength, was susceptible to overheating. To prevent such an outcome, Mrs. Amazing embedded thermometers in his wrists to monitor and control his internal heat. If he overheated, he risked delirium and cardiac arrest! Mrs. Amazing, though a being of supreme intelligence, still believed she was flabby and was prone to crippling insecurities! And the Amazing Retriever was, despite the domino mask, just a simple canine of average canine intelligence!

Back at home, Mr. Amazing unknowingly put his wife’s invisibility cloak in with the colors in the laundry, effectively ruining it by turning it pink.

***

A new threat emerged from the city’s college circuit. The Fraternity President—a young, wealthy agricultural student with the mutant powers of hazing and cajolery—altered the atmosphere in such a way that the sun’s rays nurtured not vegetation in the earth’s soil but gold and gems!

The Amazings stumbled into a trap when they confronted their new arch-scoundrel on the steps of the Alpha Alpha Alpha Alpha fraternity house. They were captured by a horde of fraternity brothers, toga-wearing men who had been subjugated by the Fraternity President’s decree of keg stands on the hour every hour. Imprisoned in the basement, the Amazings discovered little intel on the President and were forced to swallow live goldfish for sustenance.

In captivity, Mr. Amazing spazzed out! He couldn’t see how the world’s smartest person didn’t see this coming. This stupefied Mrs. Amazing, who had a hard time seeing how the world’s strongest man couldn’t foil a kidnap attempt by thirty boozy fraternity thugs. The Amazing Amazings argued the whole night! Nevertheless, Mrs. Amazing knew this would work itself out.

Now rich beyond measure, the Fraternity President enslaved the city, making the citizens—now legally called pledges—wear diapers all day and chug milk-vinegar concoctions until they puked. He put them to work in the gem fields during the day and held them in binge-drinking camps at night. With the Greek letters, AAAA, fixed atop city hall, the Fraternity President minted the XOXOs the official sorority of the Alpha Alpha Alpha Alpha’s and showered them with jewels! All hope was lost.

***

Worked itself out indeed! Though abundant in riches, the earth produced no barley or hops, which halted the production of beer. Soon after, the Fraternity President lost control of his now-sober stooges. They turned on him and forced the Fraternity President to wallow in atomic vomit before the Amazings broke free and shoved him in a locker circling the rim of a black hole’s event horizon!

At a festival held in honor of our heroes, Mr. Amazing said he considered all citizens to be his children, though he didn’t mention a strong urge to father one of his own.

Later, the Amazings traveled back through time and space to the replica dimension where Mrs. Amazing first learned of Kid Coma’s dastardly plot to rule the world. But in its place were space chunks and cosmic soot! The whole dimension had been perfectly obliterated. She, however, didn’t suspect death by dimensicide. The dimension had crumbled from shoddy workmanship, the work of some low-wage deity. They got lost on the pan-dimensional thoroughfare on their way home, but Mr. Amazing refused to stop for directions.

***

While food remained free and hunger forestalled, no corporation thought to sponsor healthy foodstuffs! Thus, all over the city, produce went extinct! While the Amazing Amazings paid much attention to animals on the endangered species list, they flaked when it came to apples, gooseberries, pumpkins, and eggplant. These delicacies became snacks for the hyper-rich seeking thrills on the black market. As a result, the mayor banned their consumption and made it a felony to possess them!

Meanwhile, the Holy Rollers—a group of Apocalypse-obsessed radicals with a gambling addiction—obtained apple seeds on the black market with the colossal fortune they procured on the craps table. Unlike other gamblers who relied on luck and skill, the Rollers had the blessing of the Trinity on their side!

The Rollers smuggled the extinct forbidden fruit into the city in a bid to expedite the Second Fall of Man. They avoided detection by the authorities by hiding the seeds in the coronary arteries of their loyal parishioners, handily outsmarting the mayor’s intestinal scanning systems.

Elsewhere, the Amazings argued valiantly over who left the milk out overnight. Mr. Amazing called Mrs. Amazing a barren simpleton and stormed out the door where he ran right into the Holy Rollers and their congregation!

In an effort to hobble the seed mules and prevent a wave of forbidden fruit from engulfing the city, Mr. Amazing stood his ground and whaled heroically on the Holy Rollers.

But they overwhelmed our hero! He lost his cool, foaming at the mouth and shouting obscenities! By the time Mrs. Amazing arrived, it was a moment too late. Mr. Amazing had overheated, and, going absolutely berserk, laid waste to everything around him. In his gruesome last moments, he fell dead from a heart attack right into arms of Mrs. Amazing.

***

Mr. Amazing was no more. The Amazing Amazings were no longer. Heroes traveled from far and wide to pay their respects to one of their mightiest and most trustworthy!

To stop wrongdoers in the present and future from stealing his body and discovering the genetic source of his indomitable strength, Mrs. Amazing shrank his corpse beyond microscopic size and buried him in the heart of an atom! Any attempt to exhume Mr. Amazing by evil scientist grave robbers would release a spectacular amount of energy, wiping out anything within a mile radius!

At the funeral, Mrs. Amazing and the Amazing Retriever wore the blackest possible clothing—fabric made of dark matter—and sat in silence. With the Amazing Amazings an idea of the past, the public school system hired Mrs. Amazing as a chemistry teacher, where she continued a career in the service of the greater good!

But to make room for the fabulously qualified Mrs. Amazing, the public school system laid off one of its most depraved science teachers. Now a hoodlum with the power to devolve citizens to an earlier biological state, the out-of-work teacher calls himself Dr. Biologist and fixes his crosshairs on what remains of the Amazing Amazings.

***

Every citizen received a special delivery from the public school system. But its toxic foam packing peanuts devolved them into apes on the spot! Devolved postal workers shoved citizens into boxes and shipped them to remote destinations! Other citizens devolved into anthropoids after licking devolution stamps. So with Postmonkeys terrorizing the city, Dr. Biologist appeared on the super villain scene with a ghoulish devotion to one objective: Plumb the darkest depths of Mrs. Amazing’s soul!

Without Mr. Amazing’s inestimable speed and strength to beat back the herd of postal workers, Mrs. Amazing was quickly clobbered with a mailing tube and locked in a mail truck. Our hero was force-fed Crazy-for-Sponge Cake, a dessert rich in accelerated trans fats! Bedeviled by the possibility of excess underarm and belly flab, Mrs. Amazing’s supreme intelligence was rendered completely useless!

Many thought all hope was lost. But a small bit of hope was in fact not! The Amazing Retriever, consumed by an uncanny loyalty, evaded capture and sniffed around Mrs. Amazing’s chemistry lab.

***

Many years ago, Mrs. Amazing made the super-duper discovery that dogs who carry diseases can also carry cures! Thus, she stockpiled canine-bourne cures to a number of sinister contagions. Now the Amazing Retriever sniffed out the antidote to Dr. Biologist’s devolution stamps!

The cure-carrier trotted around the city, liberating postmonkeys and citizen-apes by licking them about the hands and face! Soon the re-evolved betrayed their master, and Dr. Biologist retreated into a post office with a mob of Homo sapiens in hot pursuit!

By the time Mrs. Amazing found him, Dr. Biologist was writhing on the floor with a hundred of his devolution stamps stuck to his body. He had devolved to a furry little creature, far enough down the evolutionary ladder to render the once-depraved educator the perfect house pet. The mayor adopted him, walking him every night and training him to go outside!

Order preserved! Peace maintained! But in the weeks that followed, Mrs. Amazing suffered an agonizing demise! Years of trying to conceive a child with her husband had exposed her to radioactive reproductive fluids. She was thus diagnosed with a rare, unassailable uterine cancer. Darkness quickly closed in on our hero!

***

A super hero team—a husband, his wife, and their dog—stood for hope and cheer in a city beset by freak-show criminals and brilliant saboteurs. Childless except for the citizens whom they gave warmth and protection, nothing remained of the Amazing Amazings but three statues bearing their likeness! Over time, however, the monument corroded and turned slimy green, leaving nothing but three unknown blobs to brave the storms and filth of a city that now gives them no pause. There is no plaque. There is no ancestry. There is no noble heart with which to feel the pains of an eternity of loneliness. There is nothing but oblivion for everything Amazing!