My Superhero Sidekick finally arrived as a bioluminescent blob, encased in a man-sized lava lamp. Two guys who looked like dockworkers lugged it up the narrow steps to my compact Kitsilano apartment and left it in the middle of my dining-living-kitchen-bedroom. I tipped them a joint each—which they didn’t seem to appreciate.

After I got them out the door I studied my new toy. A small mailing sticker on the outer glass read: Martin McKeel. That was me, a recently unemployed postie for the Canadian government. Screw getting a job with UPS. With the abilities my own superpower pot instilled in me, I’d decided to make my lifetime hobby as a superhero my new fulltime career.

I studied the receptacle crowding my space. A brochure taped to the glass said the lifeform inside the lava lamp would be a transforming Pulchimmera—but my alien looked like a quietly undulating blob of cookie dough. I’d also expected something more attractive. The Sidekick brochure said these shapechanging aliens would conveniently transform into the opposite sex of their host, but my “she” blob hadn’t yet noticed my manliness. I took a moment to pull up my red satin shorts tight so “she” could sense my machismo. Still no change. Dang! I thought an alien in the shape of a beautiful woman would be a much more exciting sidekick to run with in the backyards and lanes to rescue animals than was my Japanese blowup babe, Hiro. I had been using Hiro far too long for company in my duties, but at least Hiro was faithful to me; more than I can say about Darala, my ex. She left me after one week.

I untied my homemade purple cape from around my neck and hung it on the hook by the door, making certain that the green leaf on the back faced outward. On a couple of my animal-saving gigs I’d had the leaf turned accidentally inward and people didn’t know I was Leaf Man, which got me arrested. It amazed me how many people asked why a green maple leaf? I’d tell them, “It’s not a maple leaf. I’m Leaf Man, and I protect the poor and downfallen—the tortured, the maimed, the imprisoned, the starved, the lonely. . . .”

Another animal rescue call was coming in on my police radio tracker. I didn’t have time to figure out the alien in the giant Cola bottle right now; I had a mission.

When I arrived at the scene I found a menacing pit bull cornering a mother cat and her three kittens. The pit bull’s owner was using the cats to train his dog for deadly savagery. I pulled my folded plastic sidekick, Hiro, out of my backpack. She’d certainly seen better days, and today was not one of them: her left arm and leg were badly frayed, and she was now permanently deflated. I doubted I’d be able to repair her.

Without Hiro’s help I barely managed to save the puddy tats and rescue the dog (after blowing a little superpower pot up his snout).

By the time I got home again, I felt depressed, even though I’d once more saved the day. I dragged the deflated Hiro in behind me. She was ready for the recycling bin. Animal rescue was a lonely and mostly thankless job. Being a superhero didn’t seem to impress the women—at least none that I’d met—so when I’d ordered my new sidekick I’d hoped that I’d at least have some kind of female company. At the moment I was dead tired. The massive container where the Pulchi appeared to sleep as a globby rainbow of red, pink, yellow, and green goo seemed more trouble than it was worth. I was about to reach in and Karate-chop the alien in frustration at her not being all that was advertised when bits of her goo began to pull apart into smaller lumps. These blobs floated upward within the tank then sank slowly, jelly-like, back to the mother blob, which presumably was too heavy to float.

I managed to push myself between the Pulchi’s container and my bookcase. My Buddha belly rubbed gently against the warm smooth jar. A quick tingle passed through my loins. Whoa, what the heck? My longish, Gregg Allman-like blond hair filled with static and clung to the container, sliding across the glass like fine tentacles. The container, not quite six feet tall, permitted a rather disturbing bird’s eye view of the tank’s bottom; there, a large green eye, with a nice set of lashes and an iris with a lavender hue, blinked up at me..

I opened the messy drawer where I keep a paper bag full of superpower pot for this kind of occasion. Along with a pre-rolled reefer, I pulled out the official ten page brochure the AID (Alien Infiltration Department) authorities put out on how to live with a Pulchimmera.

The brochure outlined the responsibilities of having an alien exchange-student, but little did the authorities know that I’d ordered her from a shady mail-order ad I found on the last page of Superman Comics #9765, “Superman and the Flying Wombies,” and that I planned a far more exciting and worthwhile existence for my companion than that of a mere home-stay visitor. I would make her my Robin, my Kato, my Rocky, my Sancho—my superhero sidekick. Now, upon rereading the fine print, which I had previously perused while under the influence of my superpower pot, I realized I had read incorrectly: it was not that a Pulchimmera needs a human host, but that it requires a human body to host it.

I put my small reefer back and reached for the mega-bong under my kitchen sink.

Turns out that this alien, in order to learn my male glandular properties and become my opposite, intended to squish herself up and live for about a week inside some tiny space inside me.

“No effing way!” I shouted. Crumpling the brochure, I threw it at the giant Coke bottle housing the creature. The paper ball ricocheted across the room, hit me in the forehead, and fell back into my hands.

My yell woke the Pulchi.

“Mar-Tin,” she called to me from the jar, “don’t afraid.”

Don’t afraid? Me very afraid.

I suddenly wanted very badly to back out of this deal.

I uncrumpled the paper ball, read on, and felt a bit sick: “Pulchimmera cocoon inside the human body, for an unspecified length of time, in one of three areas: the brain, the heart, or the genitalia. Failure to complete its cocooning cycle may result in death, or loss of genitalia.”

Whose death? Whose junk?

I let out a groan. I looked over at the visitor—a face had now formed in the goo. It smiled eerily through the wavering solution. “It okay, Maaar-Tin. You seeee.”

All I wanted was a sidekick to help me fight crime, not a parasite. I needed some superpower. I pulled my cape over my head, took a long drag from the mega bong, and held it in.

That night I relaxed on my futon, smoked a superpower fatty, meditated upon my predicament, and tried to forget the alien forming in the aquarium filling my space. After a while a strange orangey light filled my room. As I stared in the direction of the warm light, I realized that a woman stood there—an orange, naked woman. She glowed in the dark, her orange light reflecting in a groovy way off the walls. My mind boggled. She’d make an awesome sidekick: Glow Girl, or Orange Aide—nah, Glow Girl. I wondered what other powers she possessed.

The magnificent woman moved to the foot of my bed. This pale, traffic-cone coloured woman stared down at me. Then the glow from her naked body softened. She looked beautifully confused—as if something was happening to her that she didn’t understand.

She moved her hands across her breasts, down her belly, between her legs, and I felt a stirring between my own. Feeling a little ashamed, I sat up, keeping the covers at my hips.

“He—hhhelp me,” she said. The emotion in her voice literally turned her on. She lit up like a cool campfire. My heart raced with a combination of desire for her and a fear that a neighbour might think my apartment was on fire.

“Climb into bed with me,” I urged. My motive was simply to get her under the covers so that the natural light of her body didn’t disturb the neighbours.

But once she was under the covers, I forgot all about that. Her colour was amazing, now dissolving into a pale peach. Her strange, silver-white hair fell just below her breasts. I touched her out of curiosity, like a kid touching quartz crystal in a cave. My touch made her moan.

“Sorry,” I said. “Does it hurt when I touch?”

She nodded yes, tears in her eyes. “Touch me, Mar-Tin,” she said.

“But—” She rolled and pressed her body against mine. Her pain quaked through me like a rumbling train. She let out weird sounds—nails-on-chalkboard kinds of sounds—and it turned me on.

And then it was over. I thought she’d died. I shook her gently. She rolled away, as beautiful and as stiff as an ancient Greek statue. I whispered, “Are you okay? Does anything hurt?” She looked at me, but, if she was conscious behind those soft orange eyes, she’d closed shop. I guess the transition from alien to human had been too much for her. But that didn’t seem to bother me; I was still turned on. “Can I call you Candy?” I asked, not knowing if she heard.

I reached for my fatty and lay back satisfied, puffing, dreaming of saving animals with Glow Girl at my side. Leaf Man and his sidekick Glow Girl, superheroes of the SPCA. . . .

Candy came to life suddenly, like some possessed marionette from The Twilight Zone. “Yes, Mar-Tin, me call Candy,” she said, and put her hand on my buttock. She’d heard me name her. I didn’t need a second invitation, but I’d toked one too many times and, try as I might, my lighthouse wouldn’t rise to the occasion. I heard a strange rush, which turned into my own blood pumping past my eardrums. The darkness twinkled with dots of sparkling light. I felt as if I floated on a batch of illuminated bubbles that carried me to the ceiling of my room. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that joint was laced with something. Then beneath me the bubbles quickly disintegrated, like dishwater swirling down a sink.

Pop!

I was still in bed, hanging onto my penis for dear life when Candy became a cloud of rainbow-coloured smoke, which disappeared into my one-eyed snake like the chick in that old 60s show about the genie returning to her bottle.

She had vanished up my vessel. I felt as if something lodged in my lower belly—like I had just eaten an entire extra-large pie from Magdizzianola’s—but I didn’t hurt. In a way I was kind of glad to have a girl inside me—at least she hadn’t booked. I guess I knew where she planned to spend her larval stages.

Suddenly her disembodied voice echoed inside my head, “I in your heart Mar-Tin.”

“No, baby, you’re not.” I straightened my twisted cape and pulled it over my neither regions. You are losing it, Martin, I said to myself; what kind of sidekick have you hooked up with?

For the next few days I urinated more than I had in my entire life. I wanted her out of there, but nothing I did worked. I googled Pulchimmeras and discovered they were a dime-a-dozen as far as alien visitors to Earth went. They were poorly treated and even abused on their home planet, especially the “females,” and that was why so many of them wanted to come to Earth as students or domestic workers, or whatever they could get. I learned that the Pulchis had a ninety-five percent rate of non-return. They seemed to disappear in large numbers after taking Earth hosts, even though their visas were usually only granted for one month. The authorities from both worlds were constantly hunting them as illegal aliens but could find few of them..

Not long after Candy’s alien invasion, I lay half asleep in a dreamy lucid state. I hadn’t had any animal rescue missions since the kitten episode. I imagined the Pulchimmera as she had been before she’d entered into our odd union. Glubb, glubb went my heart, almost painfully, as I remembered her hot orange body. I got warm, sweaty, uncomfortable. My skin got slick as sweat formed on my chest, lips, and palms. An orange glow spread across my ribcage. A steady pressure increased on my heart, then pain erupted in my chest and stomach. I convinced myself that a fully formed alien was about to burst forth.

Eventually she did reappear, but not instantly, and not from my heart—more as a lacy, saffron-coloured smoke, which blew out from my pee-pee. The smoke filled the room, settled like fog down around the bed, then solidified to form a cage of long fleshy orange bars.

The fleshy bars collapsed and wrapped me in their embrace like many warm Japanese towels, gently massaging. I reached out and touched her. Her body-bars felt like the firm but malleable texture of ripe bananas.

“Mar-Tin love,” she said.

“Is that a question?” I asked, basking in her steamy and soothing rub. I relaxed and my forlorn feelings were extinguished by the flexible warm membranes that worked me over.

“No more, Mar-Tin. Candy go home,” she said. I looked into her strange burning eyes. I knew she wanted to go home. She was leaving like all my other women—well, the one. But I couldn’t blame her. . . .

I tried in my mumbling way to explain my idea of her role as a sidekick, working with me saving animals. Candy liked the idea of Glow Girl, but I wasn’t sure she understood anything else I’d said. As I was wondering what to do, the police scanner burst out with an urgent call to rescue.

It was a call to a hoarder’s house with a nest of homeless raccoons trapped in their garage and a warning of dangerous chemicals buried deep within: the perfect first job for Leaf Man and Glow Girl. “Candy,” I said, “If you’ll be Glow Girl with me this once, I promise I’ll try to help you get home, even if technically I did buy you. I swear I won’t hurt you, and I’ll let you go.”

She smiled. “I trust you Marr-Tin. I be here.” She put a finger on my junk. I groaned faintly. Then she rose up from the bed, and in an instant transformed into the hottest spandex ass-kicking sidekick I had even seen. She was dressed in a neon orange body-suit. A huge “G” highlighted her popping breasts. Her silver-shiny hair sparkled down her back. Her green thigh-high boots led enticingly up to her crotch.

I grabbed my bong. Time for some animal saving!

I checked the position of the leaf on my cape, and out of habit almost grabbed Hiro, but quickly put her back in the bag, murmuring, “Sorry, Hiro, not today.” And we were off, this time no stiff plastic figure beside me, but a flesh-and-blood (or flesh and whatever) bodacious sidekick babe.We worked hard to move the tonnage of debris in that garage. We’d rescued about five hundred rats and the same number of mice, but while preparing to capture and remove a family of raccoons, we were beset by a gang of drifters claiming the garage was their home.

Evil squatters! The old lady living deep inside the actual house had no idea of the variety of rodents collecting out here. It was then that Candy, I mean Glow Girl, discovered the true nature of her superhero sidekick prowess. She glowed until the threatening intruders had to cover their eyes. Then she wrapped them in that orange smoke thing she did, until they coughed so hard they fell to the ground. Then she became those soft spongy baton things she’d used to massage me with, but beat them about their tender parts, until the squatters crawled away on hands and knees, leaving behind their two-by-fours and sharpened sticks, which I guess they’d planned to use on us to make a point.

“You Glow Girl!” I was so proud of her.

I thought we could chalk up our first rescue as Leaf Man and Glow Girl, but as the orange dust settled I saw one last bad-ass drifter left standing, uglier than the Joker, the Penguin, and the Red Skull all rolled into one bad dude.

When he spoke his voice was low, gravelly, and accented: “Glow Girl goes home!”

My heart sank to the deepest regions of my baby toes. I recognized his accent; he was Pulchi! And he looked a lot like one of those delivery guys that had carried her tank up to my apartment.

“Mar-Tin?” she called out while she reassembled herself from the fight and once again became the gorgeous orange Glow Girl. She stepped toward the evil Pulchi facing us down. I stopped her.

“Get outta here. I’ll get this one,” I said, handing her a baby raccoon.

I took a huge draw off my hookah hose and stepped forward. I could feel my superpowers surge through me. The ugly Pulchi took that moment to throw a baseball sized glob of clear goo from his arm and hit me square in the face. I couldn’t breathe through the clear, unshakeable goo, but I could see the nasty Pulchi drifter come toward me swinging a long object that looked a lot like the leg bone of an elephant. If I didn’t get that goo off my face I was done for.

In that moment, while I was dying, all the goo monster movies I’d ever watched played out before me, and that’s when I remembered The Blob. In that movie they dropped off the Blob in Antarctica, where it stayed frozen. I had to freeze this goo, quick. I remembered seeing some flasks of liquid nitrogen in the garage. I charged to the back of the shed, tripping on boxes and avoiding a dozen rakes but at last finding a flask of the vaporous substance. I poured it on the goo and in seconds I was free. I reached for a second flask and turned to face down the nasty Pulchi. He took two swings with his giant bone, and I threw the flask at him. While there wasn’t enough liquid nitro to turn him into a complete ice sculpture, there was enough to give him some serious deepfreeze damage. The evil Pulchi fell onto his ass and sat stunned while the liquid nitro made icicles of his arms, half his face, and his chest and neck. Candy (who hadn’t gone home like I’d told her to) ran in, grabbed the bone bat, and began chipping away those parts covered in liquid nitro. She pared him down to about the size of a fire hydrant. Then a little dog ran out from the garage and lifted a leg on the semi-frozen Pulchi.

We had made the news and missions began to really come in. Candy continued to live inside me, appearing long enough to become Glow Girl and help me rescue downtrodden animals, or to become peach-coloured girl and sleep with me—or meld with me, or whatever it was she did. All I knew is it felt like having sex ten times at once. After a while, I couldn’t imagine life without her, but I knew I had to keep my word and send her back home.

Then one day there was a knock on the door. It was the two thugs who had delivered Candy. They wanted her back to resell her. Luckily, she was inside me at that moment. I could feel her jump like a kicking baby as they searched the house to no avail.

Over the next few days I tried to figure out how to get Candy back to her home planet, but couldn’t. I didn’t want to contact the shady operation that had sold her to me, and I couldn’t contact AID, so I surfed the back alleys of the internet for help, but with no luck. I reread the government brochure countless times. I even examined the empty container. Candy grew increasingly despondent, until one day she just disappeared.

Days went by with nothing from her: no more conversations, no psychedelic manifestations of cascading lights, not even a glowing ember. I was worried. What if the authorities found out about us?

I knew she was deathly afraid of being captured and resold by the alien traffickers. Her fear seemed to have pushed her down deep inside me. I wondered how many of her kind were buried deep inside human hosts, like her, too terrified of the torture their kind endured.

After a while, I stopped sensing her; she had just petered out. I hoped she hadn’t disintegrated; that would have been a terrible way to go. Many times I examined the empty container she’d arrived in. I unscrewed the bottom, pulled and wiggled anything I could wrap my fingers around, and then put it all back together. I found no clue as to how I could have gotten Candy back home. Finally, with some heave-ho, I pushed the container from the hall over to the side of the room, then into a coat closet, and tried to forget it was even there. I smoked my superpower pot and rescued ten animals from the confines of their owners’ filthy yards and stables, single-handedly carrying a lame horse through a field of rocks. Well, actually I loaded the poor lame animal into a trailer and hauled him away. But it wasn’t the same without Glow Girl, and eventually the news coverage faded, but those with hurt animals still called.

After one particularly long day of animal rescue, I walked into the bathroom, still wearing my purple cape with the leaf twisted around to the front, and there she was in the mirror: Candy, Glow Girl.

Only, I barely recognized her, because she was me. A mirror image of me. “Candy? What’s going on?”

“I you Mar-Tin.”

“I see that. I don’t like it. Are you—are you taking me over?” In the mirror, Candy imitated my walk, the kind of schlep an overweight, flat-footed, ex-possible rock singer, now superhero fellow does when no-one’s looking.

“I make you better Mar-Tin.”

“But, Candy, I thought you liked me the way I was?” The pot lights in the bathroom seemed to brighten. I squinted. Shwish, shwish, my heart became hard, pushed forward in my chest, expanded. I staggered against the wall. Before me, Candy shimmered and wavered like she’d stepped out of a river of boiled air rising from a hot tar patch in the middle of summer. Her form—my form—stretched; I—she—we became taller, thinner, my arms erupted with sculpted biceps and triceps. Under my cape, my Hawaiian shirt, which she’d copied perfectly, ripped open like something out of a superhero movie and there, incredibly, was a six-pack. I goggled as my Sponge Bob underwear split open and an impossible set of—well—tools thudded against my thigh.

Without thinking, I uttered a squeak.

“I for you Mar-Tin,” she said, and walked from the mirror, her arms outstretched. She took hold of my shoulders, and I shuddered like an old car trying to start up after several years of sitting around on an acre of land.

“Candy, no,” I managed. “I love you.”

“Love you. Two Mar-Tins. Su-per-heroes.”

Two Martin superheroes? And then I understood. She still needed me, to absorb, to copy, to study. It was the end of her larval stage—she was coming out of the cocoon. Her kind had to inhabit humans, then take on the mental self-images of their hosts. Candy was taking on my superhero image, making a better copy of what I was; we would form the ultimate Leaf Man together. From now on, we would be equal partners fighting animal crime.

I sighed.

The AID eventually came looking for Candy, but they were getting used to not finding Pulchimmeras. I knew some had come out of the cocoon as warped, sick forms of humanity, but I hoped a few had come out as at least good people—if not superheroes.

_________

Rhea Rose was born in Etobicoke, ON, and moved to Vancouver when she was twelve. She participated in the Clarion West writers’ workshop and has been writing ever since. At the moment she’s in her thesis year in UBC’s Opt-Res MFA Creative Writing program.