Stop the Presses! Caped Crusader Consoles Colitis Crybaby!

Continued from Holy Processed Glop, Batman!


By day 5 of the Bland and Low Residue Diets - which seemed, in my opinion, to have entirely too much overlap - I was ready to throw the proverbial towel in the overflowing can.

It was the end of my final undergraduate semester. In Conversational Spanish my tummy rumblings sometimes drowned out the professor. My roommates and I ate as much macaroni and ramen as possible. I did not sign up to walk for graduation. A. and I planned our joyous communal living arrangements in Paradise, Minnesota.

Stress? Oh, yes.

When the Winged Vigilante knocked on my door, I was trying to eat a bowl of applesauce, (my third that day) tears running down my nose and mixing with the mush. Stop crying, I ordered. The added salt can't be good for the colon, can it? Apparently, when I was diagnosed with UC my tears ducts mutated into big crybaby canals.

Through the haze of emotion and lacy curtains on the door's window, I glimpsed the shadowy spikes of bat-ears. The rapping increased in volume substantially.

"Can you get that?" my roommate called from the bathroom. "He was rattling the window here, but I locked it. Pervy bat."

I pushed the applesauce to one side, stood and opened the door. He filled the kitchen with shadows, and I reminded myself to check the wattage in the bulb over the sink.

"Good evening," he said, in a low voice neither affectedly raspy nor booming with flamboyance.

"What's good about it?" I sobbed.

He cocked his head and put a ear through the recently patched drywall in the corridor. There was a screaming burst of static, and the Bat clapped a hand to his head. The static cut out. I had a strong suspicion that some expensive piece of equipment had just perished.

"Anyway," he said.

"I said what's good about it."

"Oh. Right. Well. You're looking...whole. No stabbings. No robberies or rapes - er. That's attempted
robberies or rapes."

"What about a feeling like someone's twisting a knife in my guts?"

"I don't cover dementia, lady."

I picked up the applesauce bowl and threw it at him, hoping he'd batarang it or something. Instead it missed him handily and slammed another dent in the drywall.

"So what do I have to do," I asked, "show you my colonoscopy video?"

"No. Just take this."

A white square of card stock fluttered out of the blackness of his cloak and into his gauntlet. He thrust it into my hands, and then opened the door. I turned the card over. It was blank.

"Wait!"

He paused on the front stoop, his hands full of black cable that stretched straight up into the darkening sky - somewhere, connected to something.

"Are you really Batman?"

He grimaced. "In Minnesota? Are you kidding?"

He flew into the night.

The cape whacked me in the nose as he took off.

Sniffling, I went back inside, blocking out my roommate's howls as her feet found the applesauce. Why would Batman give me a blank card? Was I supposed to take it as some sort of stupid business psychology American-dream lecture where I fill the card with my own super self-confident credentials? A big tear splooged off my sore nose and plopped on the card.

Crawling black strands grew out of the wetness. They twined into the shape of an O.

O. Must be a Batman thing. Time to call the Comic Book Guru.

Or maybe Batman just thought I should follow the bland diet and eat some wagon wheels. I went and boiled some pasta.

....


To be continued?