But some things are bigger than a body.
I feel myself continuing forward, and as I do this I reach into my pocket. I pull out the jar of cream. With my other hand, I tear off the lid, letting it clatter to the floor, and it’s now that Eddie finally seems to notice me lurching toward him.
The massive insect swivels, still reared up and ready to strike.
I slam into Eddie with all my weight, thrusting my arm forward like a football player on the run. My whole limb hits its target, plunging down Eddie’s monstrous throat and choking him with every bit of my forearm, hand, and of course, an open jar at the end.
The creature’s black eyes widen in shock, clearly not expecting to see his influence defied. He immediately struggles to fight back, but I’m not taking any chances. I wrap myself around him, arm still plunged deep into his gullet, and leap through the open doors of the gondola.
I can feel the tramcar push back slightly as I kick off, then suddenly gravity takes hold and the momentum wrenches downward much harder than expected. Eddie and I are tumbling end over end as we plummet toward the snowy crags below, our bodies twisting while he lashes wildly with his tentacles and digs his sharp legs deep into my sides. I can feel his throat and stomach heaving and clenching, doing everything they can to eject the blockage of my arm, but to no avail.
Cold air whips past, our bodies plummeting so fast that it’s howling in my ears. Somehow, amid all this chaos, I catch sight of the tramcar lifting higher, ascending to safety while I accept this descent that, by all calculations, I’ve earned.
The next thing I catch sight of is a cluster of snow-covered trees, then the crash of snapping branches that do little to slow my fall.
We hit the ground.
* * *
A vast, endless plane of silence and darkness stretches around me in every direction. The great abyss.
Am I dead?
If this is really the end, then it appears all my mostnihilistic fears about the afterlife were true. John Lennon asked us to imagine no heaven above or hell below, which sounds quite nice in the context of a song, but experiencing this kind of nothingness firsthand is another story.
What if thereisa soul, but none of the fancy trappings we’ve dolled it up with? What if death just means our sentience disconnects from our body but stays aware, floating through the void until insanity slowly creeps its way in and destroys our mind from the inside out?
Fortunately, the tether to my corporeal form starts gradually revealing itself as oppressive, agonizing pain, a sensation that slowly washes over me and creates the vague semblance of a body. Never before have I been so outrageously happy to feel so bad. The sphere of ache that once only surrounded my head has grown to consume my whole frame, a topographical map of bruises, scrapes, and likely a few shattered bones.
A terrible, gurgling retch erupts beside me, encouraging me to find my eyes in the endless vacuum of space and then slowly force them open. I turn my head to discover Eddie lying some five feet away, black suds pouring from his mouth like an overflowing washing machine. His throat sack is sluggishly pumping, and one of his tenacles flops awkwardly in the snow, but his body is otherwise still. Slowly, the tentacle creeps over to me, barely able to drag itself along.
My first instinct is to pull away, not out of fear but sheer annoyance.
Fuck this murderous psychopath.
I don’t move, though. Maybe I don’t have the energy, or maybe deep down there’s something about this moment that I appreciate.
The pad of Eddie’s tentacle finally comes to rest on my arm, and his insectoid head slowly turns to look at me. I hold his gaze, noting the way the strange creature’s quickly dissolving innards have started to bloom across the snow in a massive black stain. Eddie gurgles something, the words unable to coalesce as acrid bubbles spill from his depths. He pauses, briefly closing his eyes to rest, then tries again.
“Bravo, sport,” he finally manages. Eddie’s strange rattle is now heaped with a distinct, sloppy wetness.
I don’t want to care. After everything he’s done, I’m sickened by the thought of these words meaning a goddamn thing to me.
But they do.
I feel my heart break ever so slightly, a violent little crack in the armor I’ve piled around myself. This monster is a part of me whether I like it or not, and I’m a part of him. We might not be bound by literal genetics—I share blood with centuries of hosts, not the parasite within them—but I can’t deny our bizarre cosmic connection.
Something falls into place, a mind file that’s been lost in the shuffle, finally revealing itself after decades tucked behind some imaginary desk.
I always wondered why my parents adopted me and then acted like I was a huge burden on their life. As their only child, I figured there was something wrong with me,that if I made more friends, gathered more skills, stayed perfect and strong and, most of all, beautiful, my folks might actually start to want me around. I was specifically chosen, after all. The only thing that could explain their actions was buyer’s remorse, a secret feeling they could never actually speak aloud but I knew was the sick, sad truth. Deep in the pit of my soul, I assumed my parents hated me because they thought they’d brought home a dud. They saw me as a defective product, and I fought my whole life to prove them wrong—whatever it fucking took.
Now, gazing at Eddie’s dying expression and watching the putrid black slop pour out of him, I realize something. My parents weren’tdisappointed in me; they just never wanted me. And yeah, that might sound just as terrible to some, but after the life I’ve had, this revelation offers me unimaginable freedom.
Along with the question of why they adopted me in the first place, I never understood traveling all the way to Florida for a child if they lived in Palm Springs. The answer is so obvious now that I’m embarrassed I didn’t see it earlier.
It’s because Eddiemadethem.
The constant subliminal disdain from my parents was never aboutme, it was about Eddie.
