Tag Archives: smallville

Cult: A Brief Commentary on Actress Allison Mack’s Descent into Darkness

mack

Allison Mack – Photo Credit: R. Umar Abbasi

Guilty pleasures confession time. I used to be a huge fan of the television series Smallville (2001-2011). I’ve watched every episode at least once, and I love the theme song (YouTube).

In case you don’t know, “Smallville” followed the adventures of young High School student Clark Kent for the ten years before he put on Superman’s tights and cape. Actor Tom Welling starred as Clark, and supporting actors included Kristin Kreuk as love interest Lana Lang and Allison Mack as Chloe Sullivan, a sort of High School newspaper version of Lois Lane.

I heard of Mack’s arrest last April on sex trafficking charges and was stunned. In her role as Sullivan, her character started out with a girl-next-door charm and a nose for bizarre news stories, plus she was as cute as a button. Of course, that has nothing to do with who the actress was as a human being.

Mack’s in the news again, this time professing her innocence in documents filed in Brooklyn’s Federal Court, basically saying that if Scientology can get away with it, she should be able to as well. Notice, at no time does she actually say she never committed the acts of sex trafficking of which she’s accused.

More’s the pity.

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Visiting Home

small town

© J Hardy Carroll

The young reporter stood at one end of a torn up sidewalk in the heart of his home town. The place was going through growing pains again as city workers discovered it was worth a longer commute from rural towns in exchange for affordable housing, a lower crime rate, and cleaner air. There were times when Clark wished he could move back here too, but his career kept him in the midst of the city, the world really.

He tried to come back once a month to visit Ma, but as always, he’d never be able to stay long. He had his job to think about, and then of course he had his other job that was continually demanding his time and effort. He was fine with the fact that the world would always need Superman. Sometimes though, he wished they’d let him have just a few days so he could have the freedom to visit Ma and to be just a country boy who was raised in Smallville.

I wrote this for the Sunday Photo Fictioner photo writing challenge. The idea is to use the image above to inspire crafting a piece of flash fiction no more than 200 words long. My word count is 169.

This photo looked like a small, rural town being forced to grow to accommodate an influx of commuters. There are plenty of places like that near where I live in Boise, Idaho. But a growing town doesn’t sound particularly exciting, at least to me, unless you consider that just like any small town kid, sometimes Clark Kent wants to hang up his cape for a few days and go home to visit his Ma.

To read other stories based on the prompt, visit InLinkz.com.