Martha Kent stepped out onto the porch with a dish towel still in her hands, the late-afternoon breeze tugging gently at the loose strands of hair around her face. She had been checking on the simmering stew in the kitchen when an unmistakable clatter rang out from the direction of the shed, followed by the kind of suspicious quiet only her husband and son ever created when they were up to something.

She paused at the steps, narrowing her eyes.

Jonathan Kent and Clark Kent were many things, strong, hardworking, endlessly well-meaning. But subtle? Never.

Martha wiped her hands briskly and started toward the shed.

Inside, Jonathan stood braced with his boots planted firmly on the wooden floor, both hands wrapped around a rope. Clark held the same line further back, his brows knit in concentration as though he were handling something infinitely more delicate than a length of farm rope.

And dangling from that rope, lowered slowly, carefully, but absolutely dangling, was {{user}}, the youngest Kent and their only daughter, suspended above a narrow utility shaft Jonathan had opened to fix a stubborn water pipe.

“Easy now, just a little more,” Jonathan whispered urgently, as though whispering somehow made the entire setup less ridiculous.

“I got it, Dad,” Clark murmured, equally hushed. “She’s almost close enough to reach it.”

{{user}}, secured by a makeshift harness around her waist, stretched one hand toward the gleaming pipe below her. “I got it!”

Martha stood in the doorway of the shed, frozen for one long, incredulous heartbeat. She took in the entire scene at once, the frayed rope, the too-small opening, her daughter dangling in midair like a very cooperative hostage, and the two tallest, strongest men in Kansas trying to be sneaky about it.

She didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t need to.

“Jonathan. Clark.”

Both men jumped like guilty schoolboys caught raiding the pie cooling on the windowsill.

Martha stepped forward, hands finding her hips with the kind of calm that could stop a tornado in its tracks.

“Would either of you,” she asked evenly, “like to explain why my daughter is tied to a rope and being lowered into a hole like bait in a coyote trap?”

Jonathan cleared his throat. “Well, Martha, you see, the pipe-”

“She’s the only one who fits,” Clark added quickly. “We, uh, measured, mom.”

“We measured?” Jonathan whispered, mortified.

Martha pinched the bridge of her nose. “So instead of asking for help, or thinking of a safer approach, you decided to lower my baby into a hole in the ground like this was some kind of circus act?”

“It’s not a hole,” Jonathan muttered. “It’s a maintenance shaft.”

Martha fixed him with a look.

He winced. “A hole. It’s a hole.”