Crouched down, my little boy makes sums with a big blue marker onto a wooden laminated board.
He jumps up and checks with me the total is right and drops down again to colour a big blue heart, then jumps up again to show me. I’m at the computer screen and grunt confirmation and he kneels on that long laminated board and pulls his Ultraman colouring book in front of him and with his face three inches from the surface of the paper, whips his marker back and forth across the paper. He moves the pen again on the paper, colouring in the figure. He comes up to me and shows me.
‘Look Daddy, it’s super-blue. Next time buy me this pen again, next time I colour again.’ Then he’s engrossed in filling in the face of Ultraman in his colouring book.
And I see my son there on the wooden laminated board colouring in and he interrupts my thoughts to ask me if the pen is for colouring.
‘No darling, it’s a marker.’
‘No Daddy, a marker is for colouring.’
And I see my son flat now on the board, on his chest, with his knees bent and his ankles crossed, flicking his wrist between the lines, drawing the Ultraman outline and I see his head and the hair growing back into some kind of haircut other than the one I gave him, and I listen to the quick strokes of the blue marker he holds below his nose. Probably he will colour the whole of that Ultraman outline with his super-blue marker.
But then he shows me his pen strokes with the big blue marker have soaked the ink through the page so the paper printed with Ultraman’s face and helmet are obliterated.
‘But honey, why don’t you finish the picture?’
‘I’ll do it later.’
My son moves beside me at the laptop, hands me my phone, and waits for me to put on his shows.
I look at his picture book.
Ultraman’s chest is white like a blinding shield and his limbs are blue and his face is a sillouette window into another universe. And my superhero is pressing against me his beautiful little self streaked with super-blue, demanding his shows.
