People rushed by him in hordes, shoulders and elbows jabbing into him as he looked around to see if there was anyone still in need of help here.
Spot was high in the air, broken technicolour and black lightning flashing around him as Brooklyn was slowly reduced to rubble, the attacks getting closer and closer until Jeff could feel a familiar warning tug of danger in his gut.
With one final sweep of the landscape, he spun on his heel and made to follow after the crowd only to catch a hint of red in his peripheral just seconds before a child’s cry echoed in his ears. Whirling back around, he caught sight of a child in a red shirt crouched on the ground crying and his body moved before he could think, racing towards the child even as the building nearby began to crumble.
Relief flooded him when he managed to gather them in his arms just in time, ducking out of the way of the crumbling rubble but it was short-lived.
A shadow loomed over them– the entire rooftop was coming down upon them, too fast for Jeff to make a break for it. Terror clawed up his throat but he curled himself more protectively over the child in hopes that at least they would survive, a silent apology to his family echoing in his head and—
Something black and red rammed into him with the full force of a freight train, sending them flying in another direction just seconds before the rubble crashed and they were blown away even further, skidding and rolling against the concrete before they slowed to a stop.
Jeff remained frozen in that position, seconds ticking by as his heart beat audibly in his chest and the ringing in his ears grew more silent.
He was alive.
The thought spurred him into action, taking stock of the situation and making sure the kid in his arms was still alive.
His leg was half buried beneath some rubble and every movement sent a bolt of pain shooting through his body but the kid was fine, suffering from a few scrapes and bruises that brought tears to her eyes but fine for the most part.
It took a few painful attempts but Jeff managed to pull his leg free, certain he had at the very least broken his ankle.
But considering what he had really expected to happen at that moment, a broken ankle seemed like a blessing in comparison. But who…
Black and red. Spider-Man.
(Don’t forget the hyphen, a young voice added in the back of his mind)
Turning back to the rubble, Jeff desperately searched for any sign of the young hero as the dust from the collision settled, only to find nothing.
“Spider–” he broke out into a coughing fit after inhaling the smoke. “Spider-Man! Kid, are you okay?”
No answer.
Panic welled up inside him as the silence stretched and he pulled himself to his feet, grabbing a piece of rebar to steady himself as he limped towards the large pile of rubble just meters away from him.
“Spider-Man!” he shouted once more and—
“MILES!”
What?
Jeff recognized the voice before he saw who it belonged to, dread settling in his gut when rather than that punk girl from last night he saw one of Spider-Man’s companions from the collider disaster last year just as she landed.
‘I’m going to find him.’
She sprinted towards the rubble, a broken stream of denials and his son’s name escaping her mouth as she threw aside piece of rubble after piece of rubble with an air of desperation thick enough to choke on.
“Blondie!”
Jeff knew that voice too, had memorized the cadence and diction in its many forms but there was something off, something that wasn’t quite right.
Someone new rushed towards the girl and grasped her shoulder, dressed in a costume that looked frighteningly similar to the one the Prowler– the one Aaron had worn.
“What happened?!”
“He–” the masked girl gasped and trembled, throwing the new character off of her as she returned to her task. “He’s under here. I saw him– his dad, he saved him but he’s still under, we need to get him out.”
The boy was unnaturally still for a moment before he joined her in her frenzy, flinging rubble in every direction without a care for anything around them.
Jeff could only stare at them, frozen as their words echoed over and over in his head but his mind refused to connect the dots and understand what was going on, afraid of the conclusion he would come to.
Red peeked through as another piece of rubble was pushed aside and the knot in his chest loosened for a moment before they pushed the last piece of rubble and he realized that it wasn’t red fabric he was looking at.
It was blood.
Spider-Man lay motionless in a puddle of crimson, his neck twisted in an impossible direction and a pole skewered through his middle.
It was like the oxygen had been sucked out of Jeff’s lungs all at once, a sharp exhale escaping him as he gazed at the gruesome sight with his heart beating painfully in his chest.
“No,” the girl said in a broken whisper, the lens on her mask growing impossibly wide as she stumbled forward and fell to her knees right next to the hero’s broken body. “No, no, no. Miles, please, you can’t– this isn’t happening.”
She’s grasping the boy’s face now, pushing up his mask and revealing a face that made Jeff’s world crumble beneath because he knew it but the person underneath the mask couldn’t be him. Couldn’t be his son.
Couldn’t be Miles.
She shook the body, pleading for a response they all knew wasn’t coming. “We saved your dad, c’mon! Get up, Miles! Spider-Man always gets back up, right?”
Jeff wanted to tell her to shut up, to stop calling that dead body by his son’s name, but his tongue was glued to his mouth and his body was frozen in place, refusing to respond to his commands.
A blur of colour landed nearby and rushed over. “Gwendy! Is everything al–”
The newcomer’s voice broke off but the girl seemed to latch on to it, tearing herself away from the body to look at him. “Hobie! Please, we need to get him to a hospital!” she begged.
‘Hobie’ remained silent, the lenses of his mask just as wide as the girl’s.
“Hobie!”
“Gwen…” he began softly.
“Don’t!” the girl screamed. “Don’t talk to me like that! We can still help him! We can still…” Her voice broke into a shuddering sob, gasping like the air was too thick to swallow. “No, no, no… please, not him…” Her hands twisted into the fabric of her mask. “I shouldn’t have come, I shouldn’t have come to see him… ”
Jeff couldn’t focus on her any longer, unable to tear his gaze away from the bloody site of the young boy behind the mask. His throat grew tighter as his eyes traced the familiar outline of his face, frozen in a twisted expression of terror and pain.
Spider-Man was dead.
His son was dead.
Some cold slithered beneath his skin, coiling around his neck and strangling him as each breath came out more shallow than the last, his chest growing tighter with every second it was deprived of oxygen.
Spider-Man was dead.
Spider-Man who had been a little thorn in his side for a little over a year, Spider-Man who was young and hopeful, who tried his best to help in every way he could, who put himself in the way of fire to protect the people of New York from villains that grew bigger and stronger with every passing day, who slapped silly stickers on the foreheads of criminals before dumping near a patrolling police car.
Spider-Man who stuck close to Jeff as if it was second nature, with a familiar stature and attitude Jeff could never put his finger on.
Spider-Man who was undeniably similar to his son.
Spider-Man who was his son.
Spider-Man who was dead.
Miles was dead.
Jeff could not breathe, each breath coming out in little gasps of air as he tried to call for his son’s name but his throat was closing up, his words caught in the thick knot of emotion that was making it hard to breathe.
“Well, isn’t this quite the sight?”
In a mere second, all the emotions within him transformed into a hideous black rage, twisting into a horrible creature that roared in his chest, his ribs rattling under the force of it.
That voice. That thing.
Spot.
He wanted to tear it apart limb by limb, to make it feel the pain that felt like it was tearing his heart apart because it had taken his son.
It hung above them, broken technicolour and black lightning still flashing around it
“You…,” the girl muttered, her voice trembling in a manner that spoke of anger rather than fear. Her mask no longer covered her face, expression shadowed by familiar uneven blond hair and Jeff knew who she was.
It was like a final nail in his son’s coffin.
And there was nothing Jeff could do.
He was helpless in this fight, unable to do anything more than run around like a headless chicken and hope he could save as many people without doing anything to stop the source of the problem.
To think he had once believed himself to be capable of doing Spider-Man’s job, believing the vigilante to be nothing more than a glory-seeking moron who swung in to steal all the credit and play superhero.
What could Jeff do in the face of the monstrosity that had killed his son?
Nothing.
“Gwen Stacy! This is a nice flip of the narrative, isn’t it?”
“Shut up…,” she said, expression twisted into one of pure unadulterated rage. “I’ll kill you!”
With inhuman strength, she hurled a piece of rubble at the monster and flew at him with reckless abandon, her companions joining her without a word and something in Jeff ached.
There was nothing he could do. He was weak, tied down by the constraints of human strength when he wanted nothing more than to join them and tear his son’s killer apart.
But he was weak.
So he tore his eyes from them once more and limped towards his son as fast as he could, the distance between them seeming endless even as the blurry details of Miles’ face grew clearer with every step.
His son. His boy. Miles.
His legs buckled beneath him as he reached Miles, shaky hands cupping his cheeks and the skin was frighteningly cold beneath his touch. Jeff’s eyes blurred with tears that flowed down his cheeks because his son was gone, leaving behind a husk of who he was for Jeff to bury.
With every second that passed, he hoped he would wake up from this terrible nightmare, that hand on the clock would spin back and he could fix this all. But it never happened.
Miles was gone.
He was helpless to change the fact that his son, the baby boy that he had raised and watched grow up was gone.
He would never see him laugh or smile or draw another one of his pictures or argue with Jeff over every little thing because he was a teenager who refused to listen and wanted to grow up so fast it made Jeff’s head spin
The boy he had raised and watched grow up was limp in his arms, his bright expression replaced with one of terror and his clothes replaced with those of a hero. The boy he had raised and the young hero he watched fight freaks of nature were one and the same.
Perhaps Jeff had always known in the back of his mind that the boy behind the mask and the boy he drove to school nearly every Monday were one and the same.
How could he not when the boy beneath the mask had hugged him in search of security with the same figure as the boy he had raised for fourteen years? How could he not when he had told him he loved him with a surety that spoke of habit?
But that boy had died for him. Because of him.
And Jeff had been too late to save him.
He was always late when it mattered most
Nothing in the room can go back.
The ashes couldn't be paper again,
the paper couldn't return to its parental linen rags.
That arrow doesn't reverse: the linen
could never again be a possibility waiting, alive, inside the field of flax.
Whatever's recently happened
in the room is beyond the boundary of this poem,
but we know this: its people can't go back
to who they were before. And the light,
here, now, or any light as the day goes forward,
yours, or mine… it can't regain its first existence,
at the start of things: an innocence.
For once it touches the world, it becomes complicit.
- ALBERT GOLDBARTH