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.