The Super Family
“Mom! We found a dog!” Maco called out in his Tattle Tale voice.
“What?” Starflower groaned, half-asleep, half-listening.
“Dad opened a gate and foun-“ Maco went silent, muffled by a hand.
“Uh, go back to sleep hun. I’ll wake you up when dinner is ready!” Sunny’s deep voice reverberated down the hallway. She loved his voice. Her Barry White, smooth and soothing to the ears, buttering her back to dreamland like a silky lullaby.
“K...” Starflower shrugged.
She draped all of the bed sheets close, rolled herself into a burrito, and face planted into one of her many pillows.
RRRRRRRRRRRRR!!! RRRRRRRRRRRRR!!! RRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!
Starflower’s green eyes ripped open from their crusty eyelids. Like every time her alarm clock went off, she jolted out of bed in a panic, but that sound wasn’t coming from her alarm clock.
“Sunny!?” She cried out.
Still ensnared within her blanket burrito, Starflower tumbled off of bed and crashed onto the carpet like a sack of potatoes.
“Maco?!” Starflower inched toward the open doorway like a caterpillar.
Her curly brown head plopped out into the hallway floor to observe the chaos unfolding. The smoke alarm chirped at an agonizing volume, but even louder were the weird creature sounds echoing from the kitchen.
“Baby?” Sunny said.
Starflower rolled over to see a chiseled giant of a man.
Her man.
His favorite plaid shirt was burnt to shreds, revealing nicks and cuts across his bronze metal body.
“Why are you on the floor like a dropped burrito?”
“Uh, how about you tell me what the fu-“
A loud boom went off in the kitchen. It was so loud and powerful that it peeled away the surrounding walls and debris. Sunny grabbed his cocooned wife like she was a piece of rolled up newspaper, shielding her from the impact.
“Maco?! Where’s Maco?!” Starflower screamed passed the ringing in her ears, yelling as loud as she could at Sunny’s face.
“I know you love dogs, and Maco’s been driving us up the wall about getting one, so...”
Sunny peered over his shoulder, grinned, then carried Starflower in his arms like a baby. They turned to see a giant, black-flamed hellwolf, panting excitedly on its back. It rolled around the burnt destruction of their kitchen. It looked as big as Sunny, if not bigger. Maco sat beside it, decked out in his silver suit like an iron man toddler.
“Can we keep it, Mom!?” The mechanical hum behind Maco’s voice made the wolf bark with excitement. It playfully jumped onto the boy, who disappeared within the big ball of hellfire fur. Despite how angry she was, the sound of her giggling son melted her heart. She hadn’t heard him laugh like that in years, not since her daughter...
“Ugh...fine.” She sighed in defeat.
“What? Really!?” Maco gave the wolf a big hug. “You hear that boy? You’re family now!”
Starflower quickly pinched herself to confirm this wasn’t a dream.
To her disappointment, it was not.
“Oh, honey. Look at how happy our boy is.” Sunny was now rocking her in his arms.
She glared at her husband with a seething rage. The ground began to shake as pieces of their home floated in mid air. An emerald green cloud of energy formed around her body. It teared away the blankets that imprisoned her, then grabbed Sunny, who did not resist in the slightest. Like all good husbands, he knew when the battle was lost, so he braced himself for the worst.
The hellwolf coiled upright and stared curiously as Maco activated his suit’s shield generator, expanding its radius to protect them both from what came next.
“I think I’ll call you Sparky.” Maco climbed up to the hellwolf’s neck to pet the back of its head, trails of embers flaking with each comb.
Together, they looked up at the giant hole where the roof once stood, and watched as their mom telepathically catapulted their dad into the night sky.
