Jane realized that, like beauty, fear was in the eye of the beholder. And when she gazed into the face of the snarling wolf, she felt none. Instead, what rose like bile in her throat was shame, as those steely and unmoved blue eyes asked a question she had no answer to.
“Why do you get to rule over us?”
Standing before the mother wolf’s pack of thirsty fangs, humanity’s dominance made less sense than it ever had before.
“I don’t know.” She whispered, throat dry.
Her growl lowered with something like disgust. And Jane felt unworthy of even taking up her air.
But the she-wolf chose to let her breath it, chose to allow Jane to leave with throat and lungs in tact. Perhaps she knew that this was the greater torture, to keep taking up space, knowing you shouldn’t, disappointed in your existence, cursed by your supremacy.
Dead, Jane was only so much more spoiled meat that would do nothing to nourish the starving pack. Left alive, Jane now became the walking dead of humanity’s hollow dominion.
These days, we live to tell the tale. But it isn’t because we heeded the warnings of red capes swallowed whole by wolfish grins. We follow the path of mutual destruction, undeterred and unharmed in the pursuit of earth’s loneliest final act.
I don’t know if you loved me, or if the person I thought I loved ever existed. But the grief is in not knowing, of living in the question of whether we are dead to one another or not.
I didn’t realize I was leaving until you were already gone. I thought we were both just growing up. But it was me outgrowing you, while you carved me out piece by piece and built your new self atop my bones. I feel bigger and wiser than I ever did beneath your faltering shadow. But somehow you still look down on me from your pile of corpses. I don’t let myself feel small anymore, least of all from you. But I wonder how tall your tower of Babylon will grow until it collapses beneath the weight of the wholehearted lies you tell yourself.
If I let myself, I miss believing in the mirage of you that rose from the desert heat of our childhood needs. You needed a mirror. I needed to be seen. When my reflection refused to keep projecting your image at ten times its actual size, we shattered.
We left our shards in one another. Love poured out of my open wounds, that bad blood draining from my veins to nourish the thirsty earth rooted beneath my feet. But biles of never-ending hatred spew from your mouth, drowning whatever last gasps of good you had left in you.
I will never forgive you. But I carry the scars of you like a mother swaddling her baby. I feed her darkness with gratitude, clinging to the futile hopes of your better half.
I wish I could tell you that I can’t ever really leave you, that you are forever part of whoever I became. But you can’t hear me, as you climb over the poor souls building your towering god complex.
I loved you. I left you. You hate me. You buried me.
Jake insisted that his Iron Man poster remain hung above his bed, so it was the last thing he saw before going to bed and first thing he woke up to. But the day after his 7th birthday, the poster looked strange — no longer a comic book but now a cut out of a real-life Iron Man on the cover of a magazine called GQ.
It didn’t take him long to figure out that, somehow, the wish he’d made while blowing out the candles on his Avengers themed cake had somehow miraculously worked. He lived in a dream now.
Just a week later, Jake saw the iconic streak of gold and red flash across the sky while sitting in the car with his mom stuck in traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge.
“ITS IRON MAN!” He exclaimed. But mom shushed him with nothing but a stern look. She had begged him for quiet so she could take this business call.
“But it’s iron man,” he insisted meekly, scanning the now empty clouds and doubting his own eyes.
The shame evaporated back into exhilaration after another streak — this time a silvery green — flew right across their windshield. Jake rejoiced and his mom screamed a cuss word in surprise.
“See! See! I told—!”
But before he could finish, there was a loud, metallic thud and the whole backseat was suddenly sprayed in a burst of red liquid.
It took what felt like eons for Jake to piece together what had happened in the instant that changed childhood dreams forever. There was a gushing, fleshy mess of skin and neck bones where his mom’s head had been. As his eyes darted around in desperation to focus on anything else, they landed on the new man-sized dent on the car roof above the front seat. A chunk of brain with his mom’s brown hair clinging to it hung from what an unmistakable imprint of Iron Man. It the super hero-shaped sent even had the outlines of the same mask he’d worn last Halloween.
When sound returned to the world, Jake heard a chorus of distant screams, punctured by the ocasional clash of metal on metal. The streaks of red and green would tangle in the air, before one would send the other hurtling on top of another car. He watched it all unfold, while a man’s panicked voice shouted his mom’s name ober and ober again from the still pristine phone on the dashboard.
Iron Man never looked back at a single one of the cars crushed under his gold accented high tech suit. But in the hours and hours James sat paralyzed in the backseat across from his mom’s rotting head, the life-size metal imprint of his favorite super hero watched him from above, mask unfeeling and unseeing.
