Joshua Beggs

Super / Human

I’ve always wanted to be a superhero. I have superpowers and everything—or, maybe it’s just one superpower, the point where my personal continuum wraps around on itself, light to dark and dark to light and light to dark and back again.

The first one, the easy one, the one that people romanticize and write about and sometimes even envy, is super-senses. I can hear the elastic reverb of each fallen raindrop, see the exploded kaleidoscope in a cute boy’s eyes, feel the tiny lightning bolts striking my sweater when a birthday balloon rubs against it. Sometimes, I spend hours running water in the bathtub to trace the flowing fractals down the drain, or churning the mop around in its bucket to study the bubbles’ silent slippery symphony, or turning the same leaf over and over and over again to examine the bones of biology inside. So much beauty. So much beauty that nobody else can see.

I have to be careful, though, not to let too much in at once, not to open up too wide, not to focus in too tight. Because when that happens, and I get overwhelmed, and time starts to speed up, not tick, tick, tick, but tickatickatickatickatickatickaticka, sprinting in stilettos down a hospital hallway, and each moment splits into razor-sharp micro-moments edged with too many feelings to ever process at once—

—and my muscles tense—

—and my pupils dilate—

—and my fingers kink and crimp, and my hands vibrate—

—that’s when my other superpower shows.

That’s. When. I. REFRACT.

A chest-shattering thwong, a blast of tongue-puckering heat, and a rainbow explodes from my face, my palms, the gaps in my skin’s careful covering: a discord of coruscating colors colliding and coiling around each other, every shade of raw emotion refracted into its pure and primal perfection. A sea of prismatic energy thrashing its way out of paper-thin skin—a tangled ganglion of hyper-violet plasma inside an electric snarl of hair—a nuclear reactor glowing through a cage of crystalline bones.

So much beauty. 

So much beauty that nobody else can bear to see.

Cars collide, buildings crumble, angry sirens swarm the streets. Anyone in view screams and covers their eyes, runs away with blood streaking their face. Babies wail into their mothers’ chests while their mothers pray their babies don’t turn out like me. 

They call me heartless, even though I do feel, so much, until it’s too much—a freak, even though I’m not built differently, the world is just built for people different than me—a supervillain, even though I’ve always, always wanted to be a superhero.

They call me the name stitched across the back of my cape, branded onto hit lists and most-wanted ads, laser-etched into my genetic code since birth—a word that lodges in the throat like the radiant, repulsive pearl that it is.

They call me Spectrum.

Joshua Beggs is a graduate of Hendrix College and an MD candidate at Kansas University, with publications appearing in Blue Mountain Review, Hamilton Stone Review, Aphelion, and elsewhere. In his free time, he volunteers as a medical Spanish interpreter, makes a podcast that his mom says is awesome, and occasionally updates the writing portfolio at his very imaginatively named website, joshuabeggs.com.