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#1
FEB 15 |
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“Obstacles”
A slight wind carried an ugly odor of smog and decaying leaves, it did not over power rather it hanged in the air as a constant reminder of the present. A man no taller than most stood alone with his hands tucked into a faded brown leather jacket that fit almost too loose, he stared down at a bronze marker that shared his surname and spoke nothing. His hands shook at a rapid pace, tears welled but did not leave his eyes, and still Peter Parker had nothing to say for almost a half hour.
"Honestly, I'm a little late for where I'm supposed to be, but to hell with her."
He sighed and watched the clouds roll by and swallowed a thick lump of air. "Anyway, eight months have flown by since we lost you, and I'm sure you have happier things to do then watch my misery. I miss you, May. Nothing is the same since you were taken from me,” Peter Parker sighed and his eyes dipped to the ground. “There is no ‘us’ anymore, only ‘me’.”
He waited and listened to the silence for a moment, there were no birds singing, not even a single insect spoke. At that moment there was only a man and his thoughts, alone with a twinge of sorrow and a lump in his throat. "I shouldn't stay. There's no way I'll make the divorce hearing even if I swing the whole way. Not that I have cash for a cab, I guess that's the story of my life, huh? Always fifty dollars shy and twenty minutes behind."
He turned to walk away, pulling tight a discolored jacket and removing the gloves from his pockets and extending the triggers of his web shooters into his palm before he slipped them over his calloused fingers. He loosened his jacket, worn down and punished by years of good and bad weather; and removed a red and black mask with wide white eyes out of the inner pocket and pulled it over his head. Peter turned his head to peer over his left shoulder and with sadness in his eyes prevalent for the past eight months he said the same thing as every other day he visited the grave marker of his Aunt. "I miss you, May. Goodbye for today."
A quick glance up burned his eyes for a scant moment. The placement of branches above him gave him the same exit each time he visited, the makeshift hero leapt into the air with hands extended, and twisted his body around the thickest branch and perched. He did not give care to anyone that might watch his movement and leapt into the air onto a thick branch that might survive the weight of his next motion and reached for the next branch with both hands extended, spinning his body around twice only to build momentum for the next flight. He came around, and released, grasping the next branch that could hold him and bounded off with augmented unnatural strength and, with a leading hand, fired a line of shining white webbing. Catching onto the nearest building he pulled and his fingers and toes smacked onto the brick façade of an old apartment building just outside his Aunt’s cemetery.
The city was unobstructed and still hid the sky from view. Its buildings splintered the natural world, cut into the sky like blades of steel and glass only to remind Peter just how small he was against it dominance. Spider-Man, at least how he appeared in his latest few months, leapt into the air and fired line after line of chemical webbing and cast his journey though the edge of the city into the outlying boroughs. Swinging past those men and women that could care less about the people like Peter Parker, he flipped and twisted his body into the air, always finding the perfect placement to launch his body across the landscape of Queens New York. Slightly more difficult than swinging from the tops of the sky scrapers in the Manhattan skyline, there was a time when the buildings there offered him a much more difficult playground; now it felt like one more thing in the way.
His watch chimed eight times with the alarm he set and, as he looked down to reset, he had not calculated the distraction of timing. Spider-Man’s body flew through the air with an uncontrolled turn and left his back exposed to the flat roof as his momentum guided into a skidding halt. With nothing to grab or anchor himself, he tumbled through the gravel topped roof and came to rest near its center. Though the pain was minimal, he let his head drop to the asphalt and gravel and with a small thump he let out a sigh from his rookie mistake.
“Great one there, lucky the Spider didn’t go splat against a retaining wall or some poor bastard’s car.”
Through the wide lenses of his mask he saw three young men and a woman laughing in the background as the speaker offered his hand to help the hero up. “Not sure I like the new digs, hero. Your old look was classic, why change it?”
“You wouldn’t believe the dry cleaning bills.” Spider-Man remarked and leapt off into the air again, his embarrassment and strength flying high into the air at least twenty feet until the cheers of youths below disappeared into the distance. Twenty more minutes of high jumps and acrobat swings, the Spider-Man in a makeshift costume took one look at the courthouse and then his watch.
“Twenty-five minutes and thirty-eight seconds late,” he mused to himself and watched as beautiful woman, slightly pale skin with fire red hair stepped into a cab. “No points for second place, Paker. Can’t even make the date when it’s court-ordered. You’re the best.”
He waited several minutes, kept company by a small flock of noisy pigeons. The sound of their cooing slowly drove a rage inside his chest, but he let it out with a slow exhale of frigid air. eter’s legs forced his body into the air in almost a straight line three stories up, his right hand shot forward and a whisper of his web shooter fired a line to anchor at a building not far to his left, he pulled with both hands and his body followed. Most onlookers below paid him no attention and Peter could not be bothered with their gawks as his sense of danger buzzed with a low tone to aid his swinging. Dodging birds and building fixtures, he stopped abruptly to listen to oncoming sirens.
Clinging to the side of a mostly glass office building, Peter kept his eyes off the men and women inside pointing at the glass and tried to pinpoint the origin of the squad car. It was behind him, and right, maybe two blocks and moving fast. He turned his body and crawled along the glass, standing to pick up momentum into a run and threw his body into a free fall down. Firing two lines of webbing, both hands grabbed tight, and he pulled his body up, off like a slingshot several stories into the air, and high above many of the buildings in the iconic skyline.
His eyes worked overtime to give his mind a reference point to calculate trajectory, but the sirens turned, and so did his left arm. A web line fired in the same direction of the movement and he pulled his falling body toward that sound. A wing smacked at his face, only barely protected by the insulation of his mask. Less than half a block separated Spider-Man and the running squad car and his sense of danger turned up the volume. A dull buzzing at the base of his skull traveled down his neck and into his right arm, in turn, Spider-Man fired a web line from his left and pulled his body in the direction opposite to the danger, dodging a flying bird too dumb to get out of its own way. The final snap of his webbing slung his body up and left, and Spider-Man rolled through the air in a tight ball, both feet smacked the roof of an adjacent building above the stopped squad car belonging to New York’s finest.
He pulled both sleeves above his wrists and ejected two worn cartridges of webbing, replacing them in favor of new tubes of his adhesive. He stood over the rooftop to observe the situation as the two officers rolled out of their car and made demands from a bullhorn, their weapons drawn and trained on a store front.
“At least no one ever robs a grocery store, what would that do to an image?” Spidey mused to himself, “I can almost hear Jameson five years ago, ‘the menace Spider-Freak managed to stop looters from feeding their families in a time of need, blah blah blah, Spidey is bad news, blah blah blah’.”
He sighed, and waited for some sign for the officers to nab the would-be offenders; a gunshot cracked through the front glass and buried itself into the front fender of the car. “Wonder, how many tax dollars does it take to plug those bullet holes? No, seriously, I wonder how much does that cost?”
Spider-Man jumped and flew into the air, his outstretched arms grabbed tight to a lamppost conveniently across the now broken store front window. He spun around the overhung lamp and released, sending his body feet-first into the remaining glass and he rolled to a stop at the center of a freshly cleaned out jewelry store. “So let me get this straight. You saw the sale sign out front and figured everything must go!”
“It’s the freak!” Thug number one spoke in a slightly southern tone, tourist for sure.
“Really, all the people running around in this city, and I’m the freak? You should meet my accountant.”
His spider-sense screamed and he turned his body down and right to dodge a bullet that came nowhere near hitting him. His palm smacked the tile floor and Spider-Man turned on a dime, firing a hardly aimed but on target ball of webbing into the face of the would-be assailant. The thug rolled onto his back and pulled at the mess of webbing on his face. “Tell your friend to calm down or he’ll hyperventilate!”
“Not my problem, webs.”
A New Yorker, an honest to god fool wearing too much body armor to move quickly, pointed his shotgun toward the hero. “Dodge this!”
A spread of turkey load shot flew into the air with a subsonic boom, Spidey’s ears rang for a moment but he ducked low and spun forward and used his arms to push himself into the air, leaping over the shot before it had time to spread. He landed on his feet just inches in front of the thug and pulled him off his feet. A low-toned moan grabbed his attention from behind one of the jewelry counters and he tossed the man onto his back, ridding the man’s lungs of any air their once held and Spidey jaunted over the case to find one of the thugs holding tight to three wounds in his gut. “You shot your own friend?”
“We…” he tried to catch his breath, “we…ain’t…”
He sighed and muttered mostly to himself, “Right. The myth of the honorable criminal; Spidey, when are you ever going to learn?”
He shot a low pressure burst of webbing at the man, covering his wounds and returned to the thug still able to move. He pushed the man against the wall, caving in much of the drywall around him. “You careless, stupid fool, what about the people outside?!”
Spider-Man stared into the careless eyes of the man who wore little more than a careless smirk and the rage in his chest returned. Spidey grabbed the armored fool tight and flung him over one shoulder, smacking his body against a wall across the room, a snap flooded the otherwise silent room and the thug passed out from the pain of a compound fracture somewhere in his shin. “How’s that for a guy with more power than you!”
The hero looked out the store front and saw the officers moving toward the building. Thinking wiser about his options, he took to a sprint out the shattered glass window. “You have an injured man inside, call for an ambulance!” He jumped into backflip and used his fingers to pull his body up and turn his feet against the building façade. Three well timed jumps, bound him between buildings and he fired another line into the air, his swing taking him out of the officer’s sight in seconds.
Twenty minutes and several miles away from the robbery, a blur of brown, black, and red glides across the sky and vanished atop a roof. Spider-Man stood and stared at the building he once resided and marveled a moment about the luck he once had, the beautiful woman that was at one time his, and the present day when it had all slipped away. He sighed and pulled off his mask and gloves, stuffing them into the inner liner of the worn brown jacket. The alley just behind the building he stood was dark enough, even during the day, that no one would be watching the man travel down a web like a hunting spider.
Slow and deliberate were his movements, quieter than anything New York would ever give notice, Peter Parker touched down onto the pavement that belonged to the regular people of New York City. Hands stuffed into his pockets, he strolled down the street, looking at no one and made his way northwest to a four story apartment building that had for so many years been paid for by his wife’s projects. He sighed each time he thought her name, a tear might have welled in his eyes if it were not too cold to bother with such a thing. But, as he always had, he swallowed the sorrow and barged into the door and climbed two flights of stairs.
The hallway was quiet, most of the other tenants were at work at this hour, all the better. Not carefully he fished for the keys inside his jacket and fumbled to unlock the door. It pushed open with ease and he was greeted by a darkness that reminded him of the emptiness he felt inside.
He flipped the main light switch. Nothing occurred.
In the dark, he moved toward the living room’s edge and twisted open the bland white blinds. Daylight spilled into room, confirming the emptiness of an apartment freshly cleaned of any item of value, save three boxes atop a kitchen table loaned by his Aunt several years before. Mary Jane had made enough money to purchase anything they wanted, but May wanted Peter to have something of home and she had insisted they take the table, and now, inside this empty apartment, Mary Jane’s message was loud and clear.
She was gone; there was no going back this time.
Of all the troubles he faced, of all the men and women that saw to his death, the friends he’d buried, Peter knew sorrow. But, there was something different about the day, it hollowed him and he didn’t bother to sit at the table his Aunt had insisted he take, he never took his eyes away, but for something so wooden, lifeless, and simple; it broke him.
He did not weep but the emptiness took everything he held back and he dropped to his knees. Peter was alone in the world, truly. There was no kindly aunt to ensure he would be doing what was right, a moral center torn from his world by pancreatic cancer. The woman who’d anchored him, supported him and stood by him had finally had enough and left him. From the liner of his jacket he removed the mask and tossed it onto the ground in front of him, the wide white lenses stared back at him; the stained red with black lines a solitary thing that showed him everything that was left of his life.
Peter Parker sat alone in the darkness of the apartment and the darkness within himself. There was nothing, he was nothing, and even outside that nothing the mask stared back at him.
He took in a breath until both lungs were full and exhaled slowly; he left the mask on the ground and rose to his feet. The tears still held fast, yet to fall from his eyes and he looked out into the city. There wasn’t much to see out the windows of his apartment, the view was not particularly spectacular that had been by design when she found the place. Little to no prying eyes when he would go out at night through the windows of the back room, witnesses were not what he needed. He shuffled back to the bedroom they used to share, he found that too to be empty and left the door latched. He turned again into the spare bedroom that was the makeshift studio and darkroom when he needed it to be.
The room was dark, as the rest of the apartment, not even the red light would shine. He could not recall the last time he paid an electric bill, and assumed MJ had only left him with enough power until the hearing and wherever she had gone everything with her name attached had left with her. Peter walked to the closet and pulled out the false wall, all his spare uniforms intact and untouched, though he had no inclination she would be so spiteful to hold them for any ransom. Oddly, it was still a relief to see them folded so neatly.
Peter returned the false wall to its original position, only removing enough webbing cartridges to fill the void left behind by his antics the previous week. He had taken a mental note of his remaining inventory, and there would be enough to get him through for several months, but his supply was still limited. Satisfied with at least that situation he moved back into the main room, kicked the mask onto the other side of the room and sat at the table where three boxes of his belongings sat. The remainder of the items he kept in their room, tightly organized and labeled with a single word: “Yours”.
He nodded his head and left it hanging a little lower, her message once again loud and clear, but an unsealed letter left on top the box nearest his position at his usual seat at the oblong table begged for more attention. The letter smelled of her sweet scent and, try as he might, there was no pushing back all the memories that flooded into his brain. Her handwriting was shaky, not like her to be so hesitant when she wanted to make a point. He knew leaving was hard on her, but to MJ it was the right decision, not much he could say or do to get her to come back this time.
Dear Peter,
I know I’m the last person you want to hear from, and I’m not going to make excuses for the choices I’ve made and the direction I’ve decided to take. It’s been months since we last spoke without an argument, and the feelings I had left for you were not the same as they were when we were younger, Tiger. If anything, I couldn’t stand back and hate you, you’re too good for that. I know life has been hard for you, and I wish you took the therapist seriously then things might be different right now. But so often your choices aren’t enough long term, you live in the moment and with your other life I can see why you look at life that way, sometimes.
I don’t want this to be hard for you, the rent is paid through the rest of the month, but I couldn’t keep the electricity on since I’m no longer living in the state. If you want to keep the apartment, be my guest, but I wouldn’t recommend it, you need time to heal just like I do. You need to go home, and I know you don’t want to, but it’ll be for the best, you can start over just like I’m doing as hard as it will be for you, know it’s almost as hard for me, too.
I wish it could be different, Peter, really I do. But our relationship became one sided and your relationship with the other side of you took precedence over me. Even when we were at our worst I always felt like it was me and you and the other side was just that, something additional. Since May got sick, the role reversed and I became secondary, you became secondary, and I couldn’t fight for that level of attention from my husband any longer.
I’m sorry this happened. You may not believe me, but I truly am. I couldn’t wait for you to come out of your slump, please don’t let today darken your spirits any more than they already are. I’ve missed you for almost two years, Peter, one day I hope you come back and find a level of happiness I couldn’t give you anymore.
I am truly sorry, Peter. But forever had an expiration, after all.
Sincerely,
MJ.
He neatly folded the letter and returned it to its envelope, and shoved it into one of the boxes. The tears had finally left his eyes and streamed down his face. The darkness in him pieced through his mind with a cold sadness, quickly replaced by a white hot anger. Peter closed his eyes and breathed slowly once again to calm his nerves, finding it hard to push through his racing heart. He shook the haze from his vision and dried his eyes for the moment and reached for the set of keys left at the table, placed on top of another envelope addressed from May’s estate lawyer and it was easy to say what she meant when she wrote he needed to go home again, though it made him realize what she gave up when she left him, it did not help him feel better. Starting over, not something he had ever given a moment’s thought before, had become the regular theme of the past year.
The keys in hand, Peter resigned himself to doing what he needed, he picked the mask up from the ground and stuffed it into the liner pocket of his jacket and grabbed one of the lighter boxes from the table, and stepped quickly to the hall closet where he faintly remembered a suitcase being previously stored. It was a small carry-on bag with an extendable handle and rollers, perfectly suited for what he needed. He towed it behind him and into the studio room and emptied the false closet and grabbed his laptop and two cameras. All tucked into the suitcase, he walked back out into the empty living room and balanced the box atop the suitcase and rolled it and himself outside the front door.
He turned the lock recalling to himself there were two other boxes on the table he’d have to come back for, with two and a half weeks until the end of the month he decided to take his time in the matter. The elevator took him down, relatively slower than he would’ve liked, but just outside he only had to wait twenty minutes for a cab to stop for him and pop open the trunk.
“Forrest Hills, please.”
“Queens, eh? Visiting relatives ‘er somethin’?”
“Something like that, sure.”
The hollow sound of his voice faded into silence for the remainder of the trek. Traffic was light and the ride had only cost his debit card a fifty with a three dollar surcharge. He pulled his bags out of the trunk and the cabbie offered no conversation when he was given a tip, just a quiet tip of his Yankees cap before he pulled out of sight. Peter stood there for several minutes; he had not been home since before his Aunt had died. MJ had hired a housekeeper to keep the place cleaned and he saw no reason to go inside until tonight.
Another deep breath steadied his nerves before he started to step forward. Deliberately slow, in the silent twilight of the coming dusk, his shaking hand slid the key into the deadbolt and finally pushed open the front door. The lights poured on the moment he stepped inside, for a time he’d forgotten the motion sensors he installed years before to make May’s life simpler, but it was the interior of the doorway where he’d stopped short.
A mirror hung on the wall just beyond the swing of the open door, and Peter stared at himself while his peripheral vision took in the words at the top of the reflective glass:
“My home is your home, you are always welcome.”
It was a cheesy reminder of his Aunt’s obsession with craft fair items, but as he stood there, staring at himself with three days of facial hair and the mop atop his head unkempt from the mask and winds, his eyes traveled to the right where three pictures hanged. His uncle at the top, May in the center, and a relatively recent picture of himself with MJ. His was a face almost irreconcilable between the photograph and the mirror. He ran his free hand through the mop of hair and tried to settle it back to sanity but it was not of much use.
He shook his head and rolled his bag into the living room and sat in the couch that reminded him of every minute of his childhood. May had always been a creature of habit, change was not something she ever grew accustomed to, and from the seat he was quickly reminded of the happiness that had been chronicled here. Pictures and crafts strewn all over the living room, mostly of Peter and Ben, but then a small sight caught him off guard. A new picture, at least one he’d not recognized before, became a focus of scrutiny. A snapshot of a man much like himself, next to a five-by-seven picture of a smiling May from not long ago, maybe three years, flanked by another picture of Peter.
The blond haired man shared much of the same features as Peter and a label in bronze at the bottom that read: “A Brother by Science”. He tuned it face down and his fists clenched tight as a solemn memory turned his stomach. A man by all accounts himself, Peter wondered how May knew about this other man. He gave a second thought to the turned down picture, a reminder of the past need not be forgotten and placed it where he found it, flanked to the left of the picture of May with his face to the right of the woman who raised him.
The keys smacked the glass table top and Peter moved to lock the deadbolt of the front door and make his way to the second floor and into his old room. Nothing much of it was the same as his childhood memories, the furniture had been upgraded as he grew up, an adult theme mixed with small things his Aunt left behind hanging on the walls. Science fair trophies, ribbons and his diploma all hung on the south wall furthest from the window, just above a full sized bed. Another mirror charged Peter to stare at his outward appearance, something of a quirk about his Aunt she always told him:
“It’s not your appearance that matters; it’s how you see yourself.”
Her voice echoed across his mind, but the sight in front of him, a sight that had looked so different than the happy pictures all across the house, showed a man that had lost care of himself. He shed the jacket and the dingy shirt underneath and walked deliberately to the bathroom, taking a disposable razor in hand and turned the spigot to an almost scolding warm, as steam started to envelope the bathroom, Peter shut the door and shed the rest of his clothes. He took a moment to watch the sight of himself and all the bruises still healing vanish into the steamed over mirror. The vision of him left behind nothing but a dark silhouette, Peter breathed in the humid air and stepped into the shower.
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To Be Continued...
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