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Jack Jack’s Unspeakable Shame

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 Got censored on DeviantArt (literally 1984) but it seems like a shame to let all this text go to waste so here it is. On a subway beneath urban Boston, a pale, blue-eyed, blond man was smoldering with anger. Quite literally, he was boiling with rage, his skin hot enough to turn water to steam nearly instantly. This was a common enough occurrence for him, though, that he was prepared; he wore layer upon layer of heavy winterwear, all intentionally chosen to be extremely fire-retardant, so that he neither spontaneously combusted, not even radiated substantially to his fellow passengers. This man was John ‘Jack-Jack’ Parr, the last of The Incredibles. After all these years, his powers—whatever those may be—were still not under his control. Every once in a while, he had outbursts: punching straight through a vending machine with unanticipated super strength, hovering for days an inch or two off the ground, or accidentally melting to a puddle while touring the Grand Canyon. Thankfully,...

My Son The Cheerleader

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September Today is my first day back in America, and already it grates on me. It is just as I remembered from my business trips: twenty-two and a half hours in a tin can suspended a mile in the sky, surrounded by tourists only to arrive in a skeleton of a city. The sidewalks are empty, no vendors, few pedestrians, just street after street of bright graffiti, garish advertisements, and smog-belching cars. Even the trees here are skeletons, stripped of leaves, they tell me, for the winter, but I think they might never have leaves at all. Why would they? There’s no sunlight in between these monoliths of steel and stone! It was bearable before, if only barely, a week here, a week there, eating in expensive restaurants and selling equally expensive insurance. But now, I am ripped out of my home in the Philippines and transplanted here, like an orchid without a greenhouse. I miss Manila already.  At least Marco is enjoying it. I mean, I know he wanted to go to school here—insisted, reall...