Absorbing

Spineless Harry had a superpower.

Or I guess you could call it a superpower if he actually used it for anything.

Or if he could use his power at will, instead of being compelled to use it by a force within himself he couldn’t understand.

Spineless Harry could morph into any person he was in a room with. If he was in a room with a physician with bad lungs on account of a forty-year smoking habit, Spineless Harry became a physician with bad lungs on account of a forty-year smoking habit. If he was in a room with a single mother who turned tricks on the side, Spineless Harry became a single mother who turned tricks on the side. If he was in a room with a corpse still going through rigor mortis, he became a corpse still going through rigor mortis.

It probably goes without saying that Spineless Harry avoided crowds, or really anywhere where there would be more than one person in a room — he could never be sure who or what he would become in those situations. To make an extreme example: if Spineless Harry was in a room with a Klansman and a Black Panther, he could never be sure whether he’d turn into a Klansman, a Black Panther, an African-American Klansman, or a secretly racist white Black Panther.

(And that’s just with two other people in the room, just imagine how unpredictable things got when Spineless Harry went to Wal Mart.)

As you can imagine, one of the questions that plagued Spineless Harry’s existence was, “Just who the hell am I when I’m not absorbing the essence of the people around me and making myself into a copy of them?”

Spineless Harry did not know.

So Spineless Harry moved out to the edge of town and lived all by himself where no one could find him. Out far from the world, with only the trees and the clouds for company, he hoped to find out what he was in himself. He worked from home and only went out for groceries and other necessities.

At first it was a tremendous relief. To be able to keep his own form for a while, without suddenly transforming into something else as soon as he was in the company of another person. He would walk through the forests and fields, feeling the tension rise and fall in his muscles as he roved up and down the hills. He would listen to the sound of the little creek as it trickled by, not a two minute walk from his house. He would watch the sunset off in the west and rise early to catch the sunrise at the other end of the sky.

But none of this brought him any closer to himself.

He’d escaped one kind of tension by leaving the world behind. But Spineless Harry found his own singular presence could be just as oppressive. Instead of the constant fear of having his whole existence sucked into someone else’s, he now had the problem of being himself and only himself. Which when you’re surrounded with people sounds like a wonderful thing, but he found himself circling back into himself — trapped in himself, in a way, just as he’d earlier been trapped in others.

And there was the nagging feeling that someone was following him…

Spineless Harry began searching for ants, bees, deer, rabbits — any animal he thought he had a decent chance of morphing into as soon as he caught it. But though he coaxed them, though he coerced them, though he eventually caught them and put his hands on them, he still remained himself and only himself.

Spineless Harry stood on a ridge near sunset one evening. He felt the presence of himself like a pounding headache. Nothing could remove him from himself. Not the nearness of the world, not the distance of the world, not the sunsets, not the animals.

And then it came again. The nagging feeling of being followed.

Spineless Harry turned around and saw it. He’d known it was there all along, of course. Everybody has one, after all. But Spineless Harry had never really paid attention to his.

Dark and amorphous, stretching out in the light of sunset all the way to the edge of the trees. Containing all of him already, in itself, so there was nothing to do but join it. And Spineless Harry wasn’t surprised, with the wind in the leaves and the light fading to the west, to feel himself being pulled from himself.

Pulled from himself, that is… and absorbed into his shadow.