THE TOWN HAD CHANGED while I was away, and I had only been away for a short while. Tall pines and birches has sprouted up in every park. Locals had put up field stone walls to demarcate their properties. The streets had crumbled too, and the roots of the trees had grown over the roads, so that it almost made it impossible to ride your bicycle from one end to another. But the inhabitants did ride their bikes. And scooters. Two little boys were doing tricks on their scooters at the corner of Posti Street and Koidu. There was a large barn set back some ways where there once was a series of apartment houses. It had been painted Swedish red. On the other side of the street, the Joala Park side, was a stone wall. Trees towered over every piece of prime town real estate. It was as if they were blocking out the sun.
When I arrived at my house, I was surprised to find Veikko, our old neighbor, working in the yard. I didn’t realize that we had become neighbors again. There he was spinning his metal saw round and round, cutting his wood silently. “Working?” I said to him. “I am,” came the answer, his nose close to the saw. Inside my house, I noticed that Saare Kika was there. He was standing in the kitchen, washing the floors. Then he picked up a large wooden pizza peel, the kind that looks like a shovel and that they use in places like Napoli to slide pizzas into wood-fired ovens. The pizza peel was just dripping with red sauce. Saare Kika tossed it into the sink. He has this stoic, silent-type, iron man aura to him. Rugged, determined features. He turned.
“Your life is a complete mess,” he said. “And I’ve come here to help you clean it up.”
I nodded along and looked him over. Then I noticed that Saare Kika had sprouted a pair of gray wings. Were they real wings? Or just part of an elaborate Halloween costume? This I could not really say for sure. But they were wings, dangling from his back as he scrubbed down the pizza peel in my sink. It reminded me of legends I had heard about The Mothman in both West Virginia and in and around Chicago. Dark, insect-like creatures with the bodies of men but the wings of moths. They called them ‘winged humanoids.’ One woman claimed to have seen several of them. I asked Saare Kika if he was the Mothman, but he just laughed at the question.
“Mothman? No,” he said, pulling the peel from my sink. “I am Batman,” Kika said. “I am Batman.”
north! 