Webs We Weave



Chapter One

DISCLAIMER :: This tale blends together aspects of Peter Parker/Spider-Man and Gwen Stacy/Ghost Spider/Spider-Gwen from Marvel Comics, Marvel Television, and Marvel Studios. Fanfiction? Sort of. The world and characters are mine, but they may seem familiar.
Author's note: Posting this chapter to give the readers a treat before the holidays. Happy Kwanzaa, Happy Hannukah, Merry Christmas, Glaðligr Jól to all of you.

(( Chapter Theme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZ7_UnqtYmw ))

The chain slipped and nearly took my foot with it. Under most circumstances, you can get about two thousand miles out of a single bike chain. Most people don’t ever go that far. They usually ride on the weekends, to the park with the kids, or on something with no chain at all in a gym. You can’t really break the hardened steel, so that isn’t the problem. You’ll bend the gear sprockets before you ever break a chain. It’s the torsion on the whole link system that causes stretching and eventually results in the thing simply falling apart. I was going on about three thousand and five hundred miles on this chain. It had seen better days. The old, cheap Trek wasn’t a fan of the hills any more and struggled on Atlantic most days.

At least the weather was nice — mid-70s and sunny by the afternoon. It rained over the weekend, though. As bad as she was handling, she did worse in the rain. I’ve done everything I can to keep her maintained, but things just break after a while. No engineer had figured out how to make it stop and I didn’t think I'd throw my hand in any time soon.

My phone dinged a notification. Falafel from a nearby spot for Tariq down near the waterfront. Four and a half more miles added to the wear on the chain. My phone sat in one of those plastic cradle things that hook onto the bike itself. The screen was shattered in a way that would suggest a garbage truck ran over it, but I dropped it on a manhole cover about eight months back. At least it still detected my finger moving over it.

Most everything I own was held together with duct tape, bailing twine, and chewed gum. It’s amazing anything works. The back tire alone has been patched so many times it qualifies for disability. The brakes scream for mercy every time I pull the handles. The hubs rattle like they’ve got a couple bearings loose and really wanna check into a home. It takes money to keep things in a certain state of repair. Most days, I can barely afford to pay attention.

Picking up the order, I signaled that I was on my way through the app. Riding toward the river, the Manhattan skyline slowly crept over the horizon. Once upon a time, that used to mean possibilities. I’d look out of my window of the apartment in Crown Heights, see the city lights off in the distance like some kind of dream. Never saw any of the bridges from there, even on the tenth floor. The best I ever got was glimpses of the Empire State Building like some kind of ghost of glass on the other side of the East River before my dad yelled at me to turn the light off and go to bed. A kid from my side of Brooklyn wouldn’t even miss the Twin Towers that got hit when I was ten because we never saw them anyway. A lot had changed since I was a kid. The towers were long gone, the skyline changed, and the facades in my neighborhood were falling apart. The dream was gone, but — for some reason — I still peddled as hard as I could to chase after it.

Back then, I really thought I was gonna make something of myself. I got really good grades in school. Managed a scholarship to one of the most prestigious colleges in the country that only covered one year. Loans picked up the rest. I’ll be in debt the rest of my life. As an engineer, I thought I had nothing to worry about. Before 2008, I’d have been mostly right. For MIT Class of 2014? Every entry level wanted five years of experience and didn’t offer any health insurance. I had to get loans after the first year, so – like anybody else – I was starting off on the wrong foot from Day 1. Nobody cares about Magna Cum Laude, anymore. I was broke as fuck but I can tell you how to fit a square peg into a round hole all day long.

Tariq was very thankful for his falafel. One more delivery down.

That was the routine of the day: get a notification, approve or deny the delivery, pick up the order, bolt through Brooklyn traffic, make the delivery, and move on. Let’s be real: I was definitely accepting every delivery because I couldn’t afford not to. Most of the time, the food was dropped off in front of doors and nobody greeted me face-to-face. Remnant of the pandemic, I guess, but made me feel even more like just another cog in the machine of the city. At least it pays the bills.

When I’m not delivering for a sadistic app developed by the clinical definition of a psychopath, I fix other people’s bicycles and have been known to tinker with HVAC systems. A lot of the fixes have been some of these new e-bikes being brought in by people with far too much money and far too little sense. They’re the ones moving into places like Greenpoint and Dumbo. Here I was, limping along with a bike I paid $400 for about twelve years ago and these people were rolling in with $6,000 batteries on wheels. I made a decent amount of money off them just for spraying some WD-40 on a chain or adjusting brake lines. Really challenging stuff that justified my degree from MIT.

I grabbed a good sandwich at the local deli. Pastrami on rye, obviously. I ain’t Jewish by any means, but I’m a New Yorker to the core. We’d eat that for every meal if bagels and pizza didn’t also exist. Hot dogs are for ball games and I’ve never lived in the Bronx. Being this far to the west, I just found a quiet spot on one of the Brooklyn Bridge Park piers. To the north, I could barely make out the bridge itself. To the south, I could feast my eyes on Governor’s Island and the Port of Brooklyn. Sitting on a bench on Pier 5, though, I got the best view of lower Manhattan I could afford. Its towers of concrete, steel, and glass glistened in the midday sun. The screech of seagulls, horns from the ferries, construction noise, and the occasional siren from emergency vehicles formed the soundtrack. One should never actually smell the East River.

With a sigh, it was time to get back to work. When all you do is gig work, you do get to choose your own hours but the apps do penalize you if you’re on “break” for too long. I would kill for a regular delivery job instead of having to rely on Postmates, Doordash, GrubHub, or Uber Eats to pay the bills, but welcome to the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty-five. At the very least, I wasn’t totally at the whim of these apps. The minimum wage for these things hit almost $20 an hour this month. I may actually be able to pay more than my share of the rent next month. Ramen noodles were getting really old.

Spending this much time alone, I passed the time talking to myself. I know what you’re gonna say: “Dude, that’s a sign you’re losin’ it.” You’re right, mostly. I wasn’t technically talking to myself when I did this. I was more so making comments to people who can’t hear me. Cabbie cut me off? He got a quip about just getting his medal or something about his glasses. Pretty girl on the sidewalk? Did my best attempt at a pickup line in some tough guy city accent when I was out of earshot. Horse cop? Oh, that’s a Mister Ed reference waiting to happen. Random things that amused me and made the day suck a little less.

Eh, who am I kidding? I’ve never tried to lower my voice or really leaned hard into my Brooklyn accent to impress/harass a girl. Growing up was awkward because I always wanted to be her rather than date or harass her. Nothing’s changed over the years. I’ve had to bury it deep, though. It’s never been acceptable for a guy in my world to actually wanna be a chick. I’ve battled it my whole life.

A little over an hour after lunch, the weirdest thing happened. I’d just dropped off a bagel and schmear to some guy at a laundry mat. The door he wanted it at was in the alley. That’s not weird. Pretty common actually. What was weird was afterward when I tapped the app to confirm delivery. My phone was acting up. The screen went all weird before the thing just turned off. In the next second, I blacked out and fell over.

There’s no way to know how long I was out. Nobody cares about some dude unconscious in an alleyway. It’s New York. This kind of stuff happens more often than people would really ever admit. I’m just glad that when I finally did come back to the waking world that none of my stuff was missing. I still had my phone, bike, backpack, wallet, and everything else. Slowly coming back to consciousness, I immediately knew I had a headache. Probably caused by falling over so unceremoniously onto my back. The next thing I noticed were the sirens.

Let’s be clear: sirens are not rare in New York City. They’re part of the symphony of the boroughs. So many sirens seemingly coming from all directions was the weird part. My eyes darted up and down the alley. I was still alone. Curious, I pedalled my way to the street on the south end of the alley to survey the surroundings. Traffic lights were acting up. People were stopped in the middle of the road and getting rammed by older vehicles.

A tingle went up my spine and wrapped around my head. It’s like that feeling you get when you’re watching a movie and you just know something is about to happen but amplified a hundred times over. I swear I could even feel the hair on my arms stand on end. My head spun and my eyes darted as a Buick Skylark about as old as me came down the street and smacked into a stationary Toyota Rav 4 without even trying to stop. The collision, thankfully, wasn’t catastrophic but it was bad enough to take a chunk out of the Rav 4. Like anybody else, I did flinch when the two vehicles collided. The drivers of both vehicles jumped out and started a shouting match while the woman in the passenger seat of the Rav 4 called the police. The tingling feeling came again and my head automatically snapped to my left. A second later, a uniformed cop in the typical NYPD blue rushed out of the nearby bodega and started responding to the scene.

Excusing myself from the scene, the headache became my top concern. How hard had I hit my head? Should I get checked out? A lot of questions floated around in my brain. Deciding to walk my bike for a few minutes, I couldn’t help but notice that tingling sensation would overcome my senses just before something would happen. Somebody picked up a brick and smashed in a storefront window. Another car almost hit a stationary vehicle, but managed to veer off just in time. A potted plant nearly domed me on the sidewalk. Quite frankly, it was getting weird. It was almost like a subtle clairvoyance.

Hang back a beat. Now, I’ve always been pretty nerdy and awkward. It’s practically my entire personality. Psychologists would probably say that it’s connected to my dissociation with my peer group because I’ve never truly felt like I belonged. People tend to gravitate toward niche hobbies when they’re more intelligent and maybe don’t like a lot of people all that much. People are fine, but too many in a room and it gets uncomfortable. I’ve never been big on crowds, which is pretty weird coming from a kid who grew up in a crowded borough. Collectible card games, video games, the eponymous Dungeons & Dragons, and comic books were what I gravitated toward. The various characters became my friend group. Sad existence? Maybe a little, but it was safe for me.

That being said, I’m a little more in tune with weird concepts even if I couldn’t quite explain them in the moment. Struck with a dash of curiosity, the decision to test my hypothesis wasn’t a difficult one. With a couple of taps on my phone, I shut down my work day. No more delivery apps for today. Though, given the EMP we’d all witnessed, there was no guarantee any of them would work anyway. The five boroughs of New York City have alleyways everywhere – a testament to the city planning that existed before automobiles. Bike in hand, I excused myself to one of those said alleyways. I made sure to travel about halfway down the block to lessen the chance of interaction with another human being.

Between buildings in the waterfront area of Brooklyn, the situation wasn’t totally like it would be in Manhattan. Row houses and brownstones lined the streets and the backs were three to six stories of windows and fire escapes. The alley itself was crude asphalt designed to drain any moisture to the center where it could enter drains. Most of the smells were associated with dumpsters and a slight scent of urine from men peeing on the walls rather than finding a restroom after getting sloshed at one of the local bars. Back here, it was just me and the rats. I only knew about the six or seven individual rodents because that tingling feeling came to me as I was placing my bike against the back wall of a brownstone. Across from me in a dumpster were the culprits. I knew they were there before I tried approaching to confirm. Sure enough, as soon as I lifted the lid twelve beady little eyes met mine while the last set was too busy digging for lunch. I half expected at least one of them to leap out at me but they were too busy with putting food in their mouths to bother with the curious human. Strange, though…

I’m aware of precognition as a concept. Knowing things before they happen is a common trope in fiction media. Typically, it’s dreams and “deja vu” type of stuff. Knowing a tactical situation before entering into it? That is a very specific skill set not known to occur in the natural world. There are a few people capable of such things: Peter Parker, Cindy Moon, Jessica Drew, Julia Carpenter, Cassandra Cain, Anthony Masters, Lucas Trent, Slade Wilson, Neena Thurman, and Andrew Maguire. Honestly, only real nerds even know half of those names. The kicker: they’re all comic book characters and an even mix between Marvel and DC. Remember when I said that this was all fiction? A person in our world shouldn’t know or have the senses I just tested moments ago. The tingling flickered again, sharper this time, like the world was holding its breath.

Pain that can only be described as a heated knife stabbing through my abdomen. I clenched my arms over my gut and collapsed onto the hard, dry asphalt of the alleyway. At the same time, my headache came to an intense crescendo and my ears started ringing. My voice squeezed out sounds of pain. I didn’t know what to do except to try to crawl back over to my bike where my phone was still in the holder clamped to the handlebars. I only made it a few feet before I just froze in place.

My body slowly began to feel like it was on fire. All the while, there was this overwhelming sense of compression all around me as if there was a high barometric pressure phenomenon focused entirely on some poor thirty-something in Brooklyn, New York. Supporting myself on all fours, I grunted and whimpered as I battled the pain that erupted all over my body. Mercifully, the pain soon subsided but the feeling of heat lingered and a new tingling took over. Like when your foot goes to sleep, I could almost feel the blood pumping to my skin and nerve endings firing all over my body.

The first thing that became apparent was that I was somehow shrinking. All over my body, clothing shifted around as if it were growing loose on its own. I watched the sleeves of my gray hoodie pool at my wrists as my hands themselves seemed to shrink before my very eyes. Over the course of moments, I could feel my shoes and jeans start to loosen enough that they threatened to fall off. Being so close to the ground, vertigo wasn’t really a thing. That much was a relief. All over my body but predominantly in my shoulders and ribs, there were little popping sounds like someone cracking their knuckles a couple dozen times in succession.

The next thing I felt was skeletal. I couldn’t accurately describe it in that moment. Shoulders cinched inward. Scapulae realigned. Vertebrae recalibrated. Ribs adapted. Hands and feet rearranged. Long bones like upper arms and femurs collapsed. Skull compressed. Pelvis expanded? All of this was occurring just under my skin and my clothing responded accordingly. It became more loose in some areas and slightly more tight in others. Oddly enough, none of it was painful.

Finally, the soft tissues. A myriad of sensations erupted all over my body. A pair of somethings eventually came in contact with the fabric of my shirt. My scalp itched like crazy for a few moments. My grunts and groans steadily climbed in pitch until the voice coming out of me was utterly unrecognizable. Eventually, my shoes gave way and fell off my feet. So did my jeans, except they slid off my hips and pooled at my knees.

Almost as soon as they began, all the sensations faded away. No more headache. No more feeling of heat all over my body. The ground only appeared to be a little closer than it did moments ago. For a few moments, I stayed in that all-fours state letting myself simply breathe. Mentally, I took a tally of what could have happened in the last few moments. Long strands of dark ginger hair began to tumble into my vision. My shirt felt like a drafty tent. My pants had fallen off my hips and pooled around my knees. My shoes had fallen off. At the ends of sleeves that pooled at the wrists, two hands that were practically tiny compared to what they had been a short time before were just there for some reason.

Using these practically dainty little hands to assist, I sat back with my butt on my feet. The way my clothes shifted on my body was a very foreign sensation. Ignoring that, I looked at my hands in disbelief. The texture of my skin had changed, my fingers were long and narrow but also shorter, and my nails were oddly shaped. I turned my hands around a few times, alternating between looking at the backs of them and the palms. Moving on from there, my eyes slowly traveled down my arms, observing how much more fabric there was to my hoodie versus how much body it had to cover underneath. Observing how the hoodie threatened to slip off my shoulders, it opened up to the T-shirt underneath. My heart nearly stopped when my eyes fell on my chest and froze there. Slowly, one hand moved and a single finger extended. That finger grasped the neck of the shirt and pulled outward to reveal what was pushing the fabric outward.

Breasts.

My finger quickly released the neck of the shirt and it settled back into place. My eyes darted forward and my gaze fell on the brick wall before me. My heartbeat quickened and my breathing became shallow. As if moving autonomously, my hand slowly moved toward the waistband of my boxers and kept sliding down my body underneath the fabric. The texture of my skin was overall softer and smoother but that’s not what I was feeling for. Eventually, my hand arrived at the target: my crotch. It did not find the male anatomy I had dealt with for thirty-three years. My hand found all the things anyone with a decent grasp of biology would understand to be components of a vulva. In other words: female anatomy.

My hand cupped my vulva and tears began to fall down my cheeks. They were happy tears. For more than eleven thousand nights, I had wished on stars and prayed to whatever deity might be listening to be stripped of the male anatomy I’d been given and bestowed the female anatomy my hand was now cupping. It seemed as if all those prayers had been answered and the wishes had been granted simultaneously. For a moment, my scientific mind pondered the impossibility of such an occurrence but could not ignore the empirical evidence in my hands — one in my crotch, the other on my chest.

Without even thinking, my reaction rolled off my tongue. “Face it, Tiger… You’ve just hit the jackpot.”

The voice that resonated out of my mouth was most certainly not the one I was used to. The vibration frequency was higher, the resonance seemed to have moved to a different place, and what came out was like a well-tuned musical instrument. Though, it sounded younger than I might have anticipated. That threw me. All of a sudden, I felt an intense desire to locate a reflective surface of some variety.

Removing my hands from body parts, I scanned my surroundings once again. On one side of me, there was the brick wall that formed the rear of a row house where I leaned my bike. On the other side, another brick wall with a dumpster against it. Though it had rained recently, there was no little river in the middle of the alley. The pavement was damp, but that was it. There were no windows within reach. Finally, my eyes landed on the phone in its cradle clipped to the handlebars of my bike. Even with its cracked screen, I could still use the phone’s camera to get a look at myself.

Scrambling to my feet to act on my idea proved to be a terrible plan. I almost headbutted the pavement by tripping over the loose jeans and shoes. I corrected my balance much quicker than I thought I should have been able to. There was no time to dwell on that. I shuffled my feet inside the clown shoes that fit my feet moments ago and pulled my far too loose jeans up to my waist, holding them in place. When I got to the bike and grabbed my phone, I let go of the jeans and they fell into a puddle of denim at my ankles. I didn’t dwell on my change of stature or center of gravity, either. I picked up the phone and unlocked it with my code. It wouldn’t recognize my face or my fingerprint, for some reason. Quickly navigating to the camera app, it opened and I switched to the ‘selfie camera’.

My jaw nearly dropped when I saw the visage in the phone’s camera. Even in its slightly distorted close-up glory, the image being streamed to me through the camera was something I’d been dreaming about for years.

The overall structure of the skull caught my attention first. Gone were the elongated and angular features of my skull. In their place was a smaller, softer, rounder, and more compact structure – the kind orthopedists and anthropologists liked to point at when talking about sexual dimorphism.

Next, the eyes drew my attention. They were the same color of jade, but they seemed larger, rounder, and less world-weary. There was a certain luminescence to the white parts that brought more life to the irises than I usually observed. It seemed as if the eyes themselves didn’t know they were supposed to be tired. They were framed by generous curtains of lashes I’d never had or may not have noticed I had. Just above them, I immediately noticed my eyebrows that — without being cultivated in any way — seemed much thinner and curved with a gentle arch like they never had before.

Over the years, I had watched my natural freckles fade a bit. Ever since I was little, there had always been a generous dusting on my nose and across my upper cheeks. A time or two when my hair grew too long for my father’s liking, my mother put braids in my hair and extended them outward. Suddenly, I was a dead-ringer for Pippy Longstocking. At least, that’s what Mom had said. In the phone screen, they were back to their former glory as somewhat prominent features and reminded me of those bygone days.

My cheeks were fuller than they had ever been. They seemed to have plumped up considerably and crept their way higher on my face. There was a distinct “apple” to the cheeks that I’d not seen on my face since before puberty ravaged my form. My jaw was also far less prominent than before. The sides seemed to almost disappear near my ears and there was the slightest point to my chin.

There wasn’t even a single hint of facial hair growth. Anybody who has had to shave their face can attest that even after shaving there is the slightest evidence of a stump of hair in the follicle, causing the darker tint to the skin where it grows. I had actually foregone shaving that morning, so there should be stubble but there wasn’t. On prepubescent children and a majority of women, there is only a thin layer of ‘peach fuzz’. The face in the phone screen had that. The skin itself had a youthful sheen and glow. Not a single year was etched on its surface.

The lips were the final facial feature to catch my attention. They were fuller and more plump with a shape to them that had been described to me as a ‘cupid’s bow’. They didn’t look as if they’d been enhanced in any way with any sort of chemical filler. It was a fullness and plump one usually sees on young faces.

The hair caught my attention last. It was longer than I’d ever worn my hair and framed my face in gentle, loose waves. Its color ranged from chestnut at the roots before evolving into a glistening copper at the ends. My hair always had this tendency to shine and sparkle when the sun hit it. After turning slightly to let the sun really catch the hair in the phone screen, it turned the luminescence up to eleven.

The girl looking back at me from my phone screen looked like some of the younger photos of my mother I’d seen once or twice. There was enough variation to echo my own face — at least the one I had five minutes ago. Testing a hypothesis, I tilted my head to the right and to the left. The girl in the phone screen mirrored my movements.

There was no denying that this was my reflection now… and I couldn’t be more elated. A little happy squeak escaped my lips that punctuated the whole experience.

Placing my phone back in the cradle on the handlebars, I started to realize another issue: there’s no way I was going to continue deliveries today. My shoes were significantly larger than my new feet. My jeans were literally falling off my hips and my boxers were making credible threats to follow suit. My shirt was comically large and on the verge of identifying as a dress. My hoodie was looking like my own little sister had stolen it. On top of all that absurdity, I wasn’t sure I could effectively ride my bike or wear the insulated backpack I needed for my deliveries.

Pondering for a moment, I deduced that I’d need to get back to my place to further make sense of things. Pulling my jeans back up to my hips, I tried swinging my leg over the bike and sitting on the seat. Using the wall for stability, it was quickly apparent I’d lost height and my legs had shortened because I couldn’t reach the pedals or the ground. Hopping off the bike once more, my jeans once again fell off and pooled at my ankles. The joke was getting old. It was easy to lower the seat. With trial and error, I could finally get it to a point where my feet could reach the pedals. After that, I slipped on the backpack and tightened it down on my shoulders.

Awkwardly, I wrestled with my jeans and shoes staying on as I mounted the bike and got my feet on the pedals. I pushed off the wall and wobbled like a Parkinson’s patient down the alleyway. With pants and shoes threatening to fall off, peddling with the balls of my feet, wrestling with a completely different center of gravity, and incredibly distracted by an uncomfortable seat, it’s a miracle I was able to leave the alley and still be upright on the bicycle.

It took a long time to get back to the row house I shared with too many people in Bedford-Stuyvesant.