Zebulon Huset

Multiverse 2008A: Dad and Tony Stark

In at least one of the infinite multiverses
my dad lived long enough into 2008
to see Iron Man with me in an old school
movie theater with gently sloping aisles.
He'd have hated Tony —too little too late
he'd sneer at the rich man's change of heart.
Instead I have one polaroid of him clipped
to my fridge and memories fading with age.
There are other multiverses too, of course.
One where he murdered our whole family
and another where he won the lottery,
at least a couple where he actually was,
as he so often mused about when still
parking in the back of the grocery store lot,
'king', and what a benevolent dictator he was,
usually. In a few he never met my mom,
in a few he flew to space on the Challenger
and it didn't scar me as a first grader
watching the CRT on tall cart as smoke
cast a slow arc toward the ground.
I can imagine many darker timelines,
local war, tragic mishaps, lightning strikes
of bad luck and happenstance thrusting
tragedy or hardship far deeper into my life
than I'd already gouged for myself.
Somewhere in this timeline there is film,
developed photos, hell, maybe full albums,
somewhere there are memories of him
I was never, and will never be privy to. And
yet somewhere else we called Tony Stark
a total asshat while crunching popcorn
in the serene darkness of possibility.

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Zebulon Huset is a high school teacher, writer and photographer. He won the Gulf Stream 2020 Summer Poetry Contest and his writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Atlanta Review, Meridian, North American Review, The Southern Review, Fence and many others. His short prose chapbook, Between Even Rows of Trees, is forthcoming from Bottlecap Editions.