Blac Superwoman in Canada

A lot of people seem to think that being a superhero is all fun and games. I shook my head as I sat in my living room, watching a rerun of Smallville on basic cable on a Friday night. What am I doing home on a night like this? I've had enough excitement this week, thank you very much. The name is Yolanda Jean-Claude and I was born in Montreal, Quebec, to Haitian immigrant parents. For as long as I can remember, I've been different. Mind you, I live in a subculture where the stuff of myth is actually everyday reality.

My father, Romulus Jean-Claude is Telekinetic, meaning that he can move objects with his mind. I've seen him move everything from the TV remote to a pickup truck with the power of his mind. My mother, Aline Jean-Claude can move at incredible speeds. We're talking about above and beyond the speed of sound here. Yeah, my mom and dad are super-humans and yet they're somehow content with their everyday lives as firefighter and schoolteacher, respectively. Not me, I want more out of life. On the surface, I seem like your normal everyday gal. I'm nineteen, about five-foot-eight, slim but curvy where it counts, with skin the color of a Hershey bar and short, curly Black hair. I work as a cashier at the mall and study biochemistry at McGill University.

On Sundays I attend mass at Saint Therese Cathedral, the predominantly Haitian catholic church on the west end of Montreal. I'm seeing a guy named Miguel Suleiman, his father is Lebanese Christian and his mother is an Afro-Caribbean woman from Cuba. He's taking civil engineering at McGill. Half Black and half Arab, that makes for the hottest combo I've ever seen, even in a racially diverse town like Montreal. Miguel is tall, dark and handsome, and he's really good to me. He knows that my family and I are different and he's okay with it. He's one of us too. Miguel has the ability to turn into a large bipedal wolf-like creature. My boo is a werewolf, how about that? What can I say? I like guys with a lot of chest hair.

I've got a great family, I attend a great school and I'm seeing a great guy. So why do I feel unsatisfied and unfulfilled? The world is a complicated place in this day and age, but then again some might say it's always been that way. For thousands of years, people with special abilities have existed among the normal human population. They're behind the tales of angels and demons, werewolves and vampires, witches and wizards, giants and monsters. Telepaths, Telekinetics, Teleporters, strong-men, pyrokinetics, shape-shifters and the like. Super-humans are all around you. The people you read about in comic books or saw in summer blockbusters are real. The world found out about us in 2017 and they didn't react too well. The world has never been fond of what it doesn't understand.

The superhuman community has been driven underground thanks to a fearful human populace. Nowadays, if the police find out you've got super powers, they come and arrest you. They tag you and then if you're lucky they release you. You will be watched by the government for the rest of your life. If you use your powers in public after they've tagged you, you're considered a threat to society and you will be arrested and hauled away to one of many secret prisons for superhuman men and women who've broken the law. That's how it is for super-humans living in North America. For once, the governments of Canada and America agree on something. They feel that the superhuman community is a threat to mankind's continued dominance of this planet and they're containing the threat. The rest of the world isn't exactly fond of superhuman beings but they haven't mobilized their military and police forces against us the way the U.S. and Canada have.

My parents and I live out our ordinary lives in Montreal, forever careful not to attract attention to ourselves. You hear all the time about some superman losing his temper or getting exposed to the police by friends or family members. In spite of our fantastic powers, there's very little we can do when it feels like the entire world is against us. One out of five hundred people is born a superhuman. Most super-humans can only do one thing. My dad moves objects with his mind and my mom runs faster than the speed of sound. We never use our powers in public and we're exceptionally discrete. The world prefers things this way. They don't want to know there are super-powered human beings living next door to them. Yeah, the world is what it is and I can't stand it. Sometimes I wonder what life was like in the earlier times. Back when humans thought that superheroes only existed in comic books.

Before the world discovered our existence and hated us on sight. What would it have been like to live in those days before our kind was persecuted? I barely watch TV anymore. All the things I see disturb me a great deal. A Somali gal in Ottawa, Ontario, used her Pyrokinetic ability against a would-be rapist and got arrested by the super-human apprehension division of the RCMP. Arrested for defending herself against a rapist! Does that sound fair to you? A young man in the town of Bago, Myanmar, was killed by a mob after it was revealed that he could control animals. He freed some animals from a lab and the local government wasn't impressed. The authorities in Myanmar did nothing as the mob tore him limb from limb.

I was sitting in the library, checking the news on my phone and growing more and more pissed off by what I saw. It seems that around the world my kind were being picked out and either arrested and imprisoned or killed on sight. The incidents in Ontario and Myanmar weren't the only superhuman-related events on the news that day. CNN reported a young mixed-race woman, Adina Hauser, on trial for witchcraft in Johannesburg, South Africa. Apparently, her identity as a superhuman was revealed when she used her ability to heal some people at a hospital. Her Zulu relatives turned her over to the authorities, fearing that she might be a witch.

Yeah, everywhere I turn I see my people suffering. My parents and their friends would have me keep my head down and pretend to lead a normal life while our kind are picked out and destroyed. The humans are doing what they've always done, destroying those who are different from themselves. As Christians and Jews are persecuted in mostly Muslim countries in the Arab world and beyond, as the Jews were rounded up in Nazi Germany, as Asian-Americans were incarcerated in special camps during World War II, super-humans are the chosen victims of this day and age. I refuse to go out like that. And I've decided to do something about it. Time to show the world what I can do...

Over the next few months, things went so bad around the world that some people have honestly started believing that the Apocalypse, the End of Days mentioned in the Torah, the Bible and the Koran is upon us. Hmmm. I mean, a tidal wave destroyed half of Tokyo, killing eleven thousand people in the Japanese Capital. A week later, an earthquake literally tore apart the metropolis of Melbourne, Australia. Sixty six thousand people died. As the European Union and North America rushed to help their brethren in Australia, fire literally fell from the skies above Calgary, Alberta, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. An estimated three million people died as both cities burned to a crisp within minutes. Experts around the world argued endlessly on TV, some blamed it all on natural disasters, others thought the planet was dishing out its revenge on mankind for abusing the ecosystem for centuries. A few even blamed aliens from outer space. Surprisingly, no one blamed the superhuman population.

The only people on the planet who suspected anything were fellow members of the superhuman community. Some feared, and with good reason, that the terrible things happening around the world had less to do with Mother Nature gone amok than they did with one of us. I know that while many super-humans rejoice as the places in the world most hostile to our kind were destroyed, a few actually sympathize with the humans. Just like in the days of slavery many slaves refused to turn on their White owners even as fellow slaves either revolted or ran away, lots of super-humans actually like the status quo. They don't mind living as second-class citizens in a world that should be theirs to rule. Oh, well. What can I say? Some of us are born stupid and having super powers just can't fix that.

I sit at the dinner table with my family and my boyfriend, and they're watching the TV set, actually bitching and moaning as they watch humans die, around the world. My dad rubs his chin and murmurs that one of us could have been responsible but most of us only have one power. So unless a team of Alpha-level super-humans got together to wage war on humanity, none of the stuff we saw on TV could be laid at our feet. Mom just shakes her head, tears welling up in her eyes as CNN announces that the death roll keeps rising. Miguel drinks his Coke Zero, looking drained. He flashes me a brave smile before going back to staring at the TV. I sit there, my expression carefully neutral as I eat some teriyaki and egg rolls with my potato chips and wash it all down with some Pepsi.

In this family, everyone's got their special gifts. Mine is psycho-materialization. Basically it means that I imagine things and through sheer strength of will, I make them real. My 'creations' only last for six minutes. I've made money appear before, along with winged piglets and a gun made out of chocolate. My parents thought my power was cute and relatively harmless, since my illusions are only real for a limited time. I don't display my power much, for obvious reasons. The last time I showed them what I could do, I was still in high school. I've gotten MUCH better since then and I never told anyone. Some secrets are best kept to oneself, after all. The authorities around the world are scrambling for a proper response to these widespread disasters. Like the idiots that they are, they're not very good at connecting the dots. Each event lasted six minutes. The quakes, the floods, the fire in the sky. Since when does Mother Nature work on a time table? Tsk. Oh, well. Tomorrow, I'm wiping a certain European town off the map. Every place that persecutes my people will be destroyed. No hesitation. No mercy. The human race has declared war on us super-humans. Well, I declare war on them. No videos online, no ads in the paper, no list of demands, no mantra. Just decisive thought translated into action by the most capacious and powerful brain in the Cosmos. Mine. Fight evil with evil, I say.

With those thoughts in mind, I went and kissed my parents goodnight. It was close to midnight. I walked Miguel out, gave him a peck on the lips and wished him goodnight. I watched him drive off into the night, then whisked myself away to Heidelberg, southwestern Germany. I can't just make things appear and disappear, you know. My body is an object after all and making it appear in Germany for six minutes wasn't hard. Besides, that's all the time I needed. With a thought, I sent a command at the molecular level to everything metallic and electronic in the German metropolis. Immediately they began breaking down. Six minutes later, the effect stopped. Only then was I able to whisk myself back to Montreal, Quebec. I can only do one thing at a time with my power. When I walked back to my room, I saw my mom coming out of the washroom. She looked at me with concern on her face and asked me where I'd been. Just went to get some air, I told her with a smile. Mom hugged me tightly and told me to be careful out there. Gently touching her shoulders, I told her I'm always careful. Then I went to bed with a smile on my face and a song in my heart.