SUPERWORLD

François I

Failure, yet again.

François could not help but feel useless, he looked down at the manuscript on his desk and had come to this conclusion. Of course, he had finished the manuscript of Ma Vie en Peinture: Les Triomphes et Les Tragédies de François Léon Antoinette, but in writing it, he realized that the tragedies and failures greatly outweighed the triumphs and success. He failed at completing high school, he failed at being a boyfriend to his dear Élisabeth, he failed at providing for their child, he failed as a painter, he failed as a writer, and he failed as a father.

Françoise must be fifteen by now, and how many times have I seen mon petite? Once in the last year, maybe. François thought back to that day at the bakery, Grand-père Louie had sent him to fetch the day's bread and as he waited in line, he saw them. They walked into the same bakery, fate, he thought. His Élisabeth and Françoise together at the same bakery as him at the same time. He ran over to his daughter, overjoyed.

"Françoise! Mon chérie, look how you've grown!" He embraced her then, but she pushed him away.

"François, get the hell away from me. You're no father of mine." Her words cut deep, made even deeper by the fact that she said these things with no emotion. She didn't love him, but she also didn't hate him. She didn't care that he existed. He turned to Élisabeth, more womanly than she was back in high school when they shared a passion for one another, and yet more beautiful, even in her nurse's uniform and even with the bags under her eyes from all the late shifts.

"Lizzy, mon cœur, you are stunning!" He said turning to the woman he impregnated and abandoned in his seventeenth year.

"François, I am in no mood for you. Especially since you have yet to send any of the back child support you owe me." She was cold too, these women he loved only wounded him.

"Do you only care for money?" François asked, his frown so deep that the lit Gitane cigarette in his mouth nearly tumbled to the floor.

"Do you care only for yourself?" She snapped. "When you abandon people, you don't just get to pop back in whenever you like!" Her reply was like a thousand knives to the heart.

"My darling, please, just one more chance and—" She slapped him.

"You used your last chance when you quit the paper!" She spat.

He left the bakery shattered and without bread. That was the day he had decided to write his autobiography, a last-ditch effort to make his name and art known. At least, the art he cared about. Élisabeth's father was head of a nationally syndicated newspaper, he had gotten François a job as a cartoonist, drawing a comic strip called Remy Le Fou which had been serialized for more than eight years. François had despised le bande dessiné, a satirical take on modern finance for rich cunts to giggle at, then pretend they never read.

So what if I quit? It wasn't real art! Françoise would have been mocked in school for having a father like that.

His cell phone rang and he looked at the caller ID. It was Élisabeth's father, Henri, probably complaining about how late I turned on the comic. Mon Dieu, why does he not understand that even lowbrow art takes time?

François was in no mood to be yelled at by the man that was never really his father-in-law, François felt in the mood for action. He pulled a cigarette from the blue box of Gitanes he always carried and lit it, puffing the earthy smoke before he grabbed the bag from the hardware store and pulled from it the coarse length of rope he had purchased after completing the manuscript.

He then fashioned it into a noose using a guide from the internet. He slung it to the rafters of his grandfather's attic that he had called home these many years and grabbed the stool from the corner. He positioned it under the rope and slipped his head into the noose before tightening it. He saw up in the rafters one of his paintings Lady Poverty, a grand woman in rags sitting in a destitute throne room upon a chair of garbage with a naked, emaciated man as a footstool.