The Monster in Your Closet

I’m going to be a superhero.

I learned quickly that many adults didn’t consider this a valid answer to the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

That didn’t mean I stopped dreaming about it, or planning the glory days to come with my just-younger sister. It only meant I stopped telling adults about it, and learned to throw them off the scent with an ever-changing sequence of what I thought might be good day jobs.

I would be Dark Moon to my sister’s Silver Star.

Villains, we knew, would someday tremble before us as we flew through the air and used our magic lightning bolts to stop their land-flight!

Yet with few exceptions, we intended to show them mercy, if they seemed genuinely apologetic.

Two decades later, neither Dark Moon nor Silver Star have yet been on a single crime-fighting mission, but there’s another way that they live on while their superpowers continue gestating.

Every so often, Silver Star finds a necklace that would be the perfect fit for Dark Moon’s crime-fighting costume.

And when she does, she sends the necklace to Dark Moon, who wears it with her day job outfits in the meantime, and smiles to think of how in so doing “the dreams of two little girls thus live on in the women they’ve become. ♥”

This Christmas, Silver Star struck again!

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© 2011 Deborah Bryan. All rights reserved.
Duplication in whole or substantial portion is explicitly forbidden.