Give Us This Day
You figure the fastest way to go would be to blast your brains out, but you don't have a gun, and you've never liked messes.
Drowning sounds easy, but you're a chicken-shit, and you know you'd cop out with air six inches from your face in the bathroom tub.
Gas, pills, slit throat; the matchsticks in your back pocket alight on the cheap, garage-sale sofa you bought last week. There are so many ways you can choose from to help yourself along.
Life is fragile and unfair; you'd forgot. But not now—no, not now. Now you're seeing things clearly for the very first time; you don't belong here. You can't.
You've had a bad run of things, but you're a good guy, really—you've always been a real good guy.
Church every Sunday with pressed slacks and a clean white shirt, and Mom all dolled up in the first pew with Dad, dazed, beside her—and you loved them so much, and never doubted a single thing your minister said.
You loved them, but you failed them—Spiderman made you fail them!—and they won't return your calls; nobody returns your calls anymore (not even Ann; she says she's making a fresh start—a new life. One without you), and you're so tired of this. You're tired of life, already—it's never done any favors for you—and you're all set for it to end; you're going to rig a noose up over your door as soon as you reach the shitty apartment you call your home, and jump off your wobbling kitchen chair with it around your throat (you're such a big man; all that mass will snap your strangely delicate neck straight in two).
But you've still got principles, damn it—you've always been big on those; it's not your fault that hasn't worked out for you.
You stop at a forlorn little church squatting uncomfortably between a bike shop and a liquor store—kneel, and apologize for what you're about to do to anyone who's even still listening up there.
Your hands are clasped and there's a sharp, constricting pain around your chest, and you let loose and cry like the scared/lonely/pathetic man you are. It's okay—no one's there to see you. You don't have to be strong.
But you want to be; that's just it—you want to be so many things (good son/husband/reporter), but you're not. Spiderman's taken that all away from you—Spiderman's destroyed everything that was ever important to you, and he doesn't even know it. You hate him—you hate him more than you could possibly say—more than—more than—you hate him. He did all of this to you, and your tears are raking-hot and angryangryangry. You shake with that hate; you shudder and sniffle and there's a coarse coil of rope waiting in your bottom drawer with your name on it, and you hate that Spiderman has brought you to this. It's all his fault. All of it.
Something's snaking up your thigh, then, and you gasp—your eyes snap open gunshot-quick and there's something moving up your thigh!
You scream; a black glob is sliding over your chest and sinking into your skin—you can feel it; crawling in through your anguished, open mouth and slipping smoothly into your nostrils and ears—molding to you; into you.
It feels soft; liquid and safe, and then you can't feel it at all, except as a comforting presence inside you—tingling and thrillingly overwhelming, like your first kiss.
Don't fear me, says something inside your head, which is ridiculous, because how can you fear yourself?
I want you, it says.
I need you...
"I—what—"; your voice trembles.
I love you, and it's so sincere.
Will you accept me? Will you love me? Will you be me? it pleads, silky in your head, yet so weak—hopeful and strained—and you think: Yes. Yes.
There's warmth, then; warmth seeping in everywhere, to your very bones, and in your blood, and into the convoluted tissue-twists of your brain, and you can't stop it—don't want to stop it, because this is the single most wonderful thing that's ever happened to you.
You feel yourself changing; feel power blossoming inside your veins—love and attention and intelligence burying itself into every atom. Your body contorts and expands and becomes better in a thousand little things all at once; broken parts inside you start to heal, and you are whole again—you are complete.
You feel...beautiful; strong.
We are together murmurs the voice, and you feel the words escape your own mouth.
Yes, you think, and wipe away your stringy, sticky-pale cum off your stomach with one exquisite claw.