The Anatomically-correct Adventures of a Spider-like Man

“Aww man, I didn’t want this.”

For Christmas that year, Jack had asked his parents for the latest Virtual Reality game setup. Instead, his parents decided to go full science on him and got him a “Do It Yourself Bacterial Gene Engineering CRISPR Kit” from one of those catalogs that arrive around Christmastime.

“We thought it would be cute. After all, you’re the family’s first molecular biologist!” his mom said, bringing her hands together in what looked to Jack like a golf clap, with his dad scowling.

“I told you he wouldn’t like it. It’ll probably make him stink up the house even more. We should have gotten him a bar of soap with some instructions, for Christ’s sake,” his dad said, his eyebrows becoming more furrowed. “I still say we should make him pay rent, or at the very least install an exhaust fan in his room.”

“Pay with what, dear? Remember he’s unemployed,” his mom said.

“He’d be employable if he took a shower once in a while. Or maybe he could engineer something with those bacteria that eliminate body odor, like Staphylococcus epidermidis and Propionibacterium acnes. That was my one hope in getting you this kit.”

“But I can’t shower with those bacteria,” Jack sat up, puffing his chest out slightly. “They just wash off and go down the drain.”

“I’ll bet you a water bill that it won’t matter,” his dad growled back, waving a piece of paper he had just grabbed out of his pocket. “You haven’t taken a shower since you moved in three months ago! I have proof!”

After making the E. coli that came with the kit glow and smell even worse than before, he figured he was ready for something different, preferably something that didn’t smell or would make his dad complain more.

He’d always had a fascination with Spider Man. All his friends had seen the movies with him and they all loved to secretly imagine they were kissing Mary Jane Watson upside down in the rain. His fascination went several steps further though, especially as he began to experiment more with the CRISPR kit.

He applied his molecular biology degree and began to do genetic research on what makes spiders strong, agile, have eight legs, make spider silk, and be superior hunters. His research had narrowed to the mygalomorph Brazilian white-knee tarantula, Acanthoscurria geniculata, figuring they would be the ones most suited to his ulterior fantasy.

His research went into the exons of the spider genome, and he found about 2200 gene models that corresponded to being uniquely tarantula spider proteins. He then cross-referenced those against similar human models and found them to be remarkably similar. So similar, that he reasoned the 15 proteins that corresponded with tarantula silk could be inserted into a human genome with no ill effect.

Jack decided to order tarantula eggs from a supplier in Korea, since the Koreans were offering the cheapest price for the eggs and shipping costs, using Google translate for translating his request into what he thought was understandable Korean. He didn’t know anyone from Korea and made no attempt to understand Korean beyond enjoying kimchi and ojinguh bokum from the local Korean bistro down the street from where he lived.

“What the hell did you eat today? It smells like rancid cabbage in here,” his dad yelled, fanning the room with the latest issue of Forbes.

When the eggs arrived in their cryogenic packaging, Jack got to work on extracting the appropriate exons using the premapped sequences he had calculated earlier and his CRISPR kit. Once he had isolated the exons from the DNA strand, he then planned to use CRISPR to splice the human DNA and gene-repair tools to insert the exons into the human genome via a virus-delivery system.

He was about to inject the virus into his Magna Cum Laude, over-achieving, little brother, who did actually get the virtual reality game set, when the door opened and his mom startled him enough that he stabbed himself with the needle instead. His mom panicked when she saw the needle and accused him of doing drugs of some sort, but then Jack managed to convince her that he was actually extracting some of his tissue for testing his DNA using the CRISPR kit.

“Oh, you’re using the kit we got you? That’s fantastic! Wait until I tell your dad!” his mom squealed, then paused. “But I don’t remember there being any needles in the packaging.”

“Oh, I had some leftover from school. I guess I forgot to return them.”

“Okay,” his mom grimaced a little. “Make sure you return them tomorrow. It’s supposed to be a nice day. It’d be good for you to get out of the house. Are you using the needles for the bacteria experiment your dad wanted you to try?”

“Yup. I’m almost done!”

“Oh, Jack. Your dad will be so happy. He may even get rid of his air freshener habit.”

“Oh man, I hope so. That stuff makes me sneeze.”

“Oh, I’ve noticed,” his mom narrowed her eyes malevolently as she smiled.

Jack went to sleep that night feeling proud of himself for the lie he had told his mom.

The next day he woke up with a slightly stuffed nose. He grabbed a tissue from the box by his bed and was about to blow it when his dad barged into his room, wielding a can of Fabreze in front of him like a can of mace.

“No, no, son, don’t get up,” his dad’s finger twittered nervously on top of the Fabreze can. “Your mom just told me that you’re almost done with the stink-eating bacteria experiment.”

His dad cautiously stepped over a pizza box and several empty Korean take-out containers. His dad gave a pretend sniff.

“Huh, it smells better in here already! That’s great, son!” he turned and his foot slipped on one of the pizza boxes.

“Whoa, dad!” Jack’s hand went out to grab him.

Jack’s hand caught his dad’s arm, triggering his dad to spray the Fabreze can for a full-second directly in Jack’s face.

Jack, now standing upright, let go of his dad and flailed himself with his arms as he tried to dissipate the Fabreze from himself. His dad fell on the floor, sending a pizza box and several more receipts flying through the air. Jack grabbed one of the receipts as he continued flapping his arms maniacally.

As he felt the first drips of the sneeze emerge from his nostrils, he realized this sneeze was going to be profoundly different, because he saw it expand. The sneeze was subliming out of his nose from a slight spray to a solid cone of gelatinous goo.

Jack’s gaze was taken from the rapidly expanding cone to his father’s look of horror as the sneeze expanded further and made first contact with his dad’s Rolex, just brushing the cuff of the Armani suit he was wearing as he held up his arm in self-defense. The snot spray completely enveloped his dad’s arm as it continued its journey, still expanding, to his face.

The snot cone ended by encapsulating the front half of the entire upper torso of his dad along with a roughly six foot conical area behind him.

His dad sat blinking at himself in wonderment and horror as he tried to flick the stuff out of his eyes and off himself. It wouldn’t let go.

“Gah,” he sputtered. “What the hell…?”

Jack’s eyes focused on a line in the receipt that he hadn’t even looked at before.

“They’re not tarantula eggs,” he said softly.

“What did you just do, Jack?” his dad screamed, holding out his hand. “Help me up!”

Jack calmly went to the computer and muttered “Hagfish” as he looked up an article online.

“What did you just say?” his dad asked, a fraction more calmly than before, trying to right himself from the floor while still covered in the slime.

“Huh,” Jack said to himself as he read. “A cc of hagfish slime, released from one of the animal’s mucus glands, will expand to a cubic meter.”

“Is it contagious? Oh my God,” his dad stood and continued to try to wipe the gunk off him. “Why won’t it come off? Why won’t it come off?”

Jack turned to face his dad.

“Give me that can.”

“What? No!” his dad backed away slowly, cradling the can in front of him.

“Oh right. Sorry. Manners. Give me that can, please,” Jack approached him holding his hands up, palms out in a surrender gesture.

“Jack, what’s going…” his mom burst into the room and saw Jack approaching his slime-covered father.

His dad, surprised, slipped and again sprayed the Fabreze as he fell, scenting the entire room with the sweet smell of chemically-stagnant floral fuckery as he covered himself in even more of Jack’s mucous spread out on the floor behind him.

Jack started to sneeze, again.

Jack began to wonder why time appeared to slow as he prepared to sneeze. He observed the sudden inhalation that occurs before a sneeze as a person readies his nasal passages for rapid expulsion. He also noticed his mom’s eyebrows rise and her hands coming together, once again, in a slow motion golf clap. His dad, seeing Jack ready himself once more to sneeze, tucked into a fetal position and shielded his head with his goo-covered arms.

Jack forced the sneeze through his nose, sending the bulk of it in a 120 mph snot ball to his dad’s trapezius, exploding upon impact and sending mucous bits to where no mucous bits had gone before, at least in his room. He marveled as he watched each mucous bit, thousands of them, scatter and somersault through the dust-speckled air, until they finally stopped in a sinister squiggle-shimmy against one of the many surfaces, including the tiled-ceiling.

“I guess hagfish must have something like a ‘Spidey-sense’ of time when they’re attacked,” Jack remarked to himself, following the sneeze, as he turned back toward his computer. “That would make sense, given that they’re usually on the low end of the food chain and they release their slime to defend themselves.”

“Jack?” his mom quietly interrupted.

“To prevent choking on its slime, a hagfish will sneeze out its slime-filled nostril,” Jack read as he flicked away some of the slime from his computer screen. “They’re also considered a delicacy in Korea. That explains the mix-up with the eggs.”

“Jack!” his mom shouted.

He turned and saw his slime-speckled mom wither in disgust as she tried to wipe the gunk off her face. His dad slowly got up from the floor, still holding the Fabreze can in front of him, waving it from side to side like a fire extinguisher. The Fabreze can slipped out of his hands and bounced on the floor just once, having stuck itself to one of the slimy surfaces.

“I think you need to go to the doctor,” his mom said, her voice quaking, as she took in the full scope of the mess before her.

“At least he doesn’t smell anymore,” his dad remarked. “Although that might because I have his slime in my nose. Could someone hand me a tissue?”

Jack thought about the virus he had used to deliver the hagfish gene exons to his cells for a few seconds longer than was necessary.

“Yeah, I think that might be a good idea,” he said, as he reached for the tissue box.

His dad snatched it out of his hand and pulled out at least twelve tissues in succession.

“Well son,” his dad said while blowing Jack’s slime from his nose and applying the tissues fastidiously to other parts of his suit. “You’ve given me one hell of a story to share with your girlfriend at the dry cleaners.”

Jack noticed his dad had momentarily put down the can of Fabreze. Jack discretely moved it out of his dad’s field of view and tossed it behind his bed.

“Aww, man. Dad, please don’t tell Stacy. She’s one of the few girls I can talk to.”

“I’ll tell you what, I’ll tell her that you’re horribly sick. Who knows? She might feel sorry for you, kind of like I do…every…single…day.”

With that, Jack’s dad slipped a few more times on the slime as he tried to snake his way out of Jack’s room, but he was able to avoid falling on his butt. At one point, he checked his pockets and glanced around, looking for something, then cackled and continued slipping out the door.

Jack’s mom slid across the floor to Jack, about to caress his face, then thinking better of it.

“It looks like I should make you some chicken-soup…with that…or this…” she wiped the slime from her face, glanced at it with disgust and tried to smile. “…cold you’ve contracted.”

“Umm yeah. It’s just a cold is all. Can you grab me some paper towels? I’m going to try to clean this up.”

“Really?” his mom’s face brightened as she left the room to obtain a crate of paper towels. She shopped at Sam’s Club, often.

“Unless you want to do it,” he said as he brought his hand up from a large pile of slime on his desk. The slime stretched and twitched for about three feet before snapping into two strands. One of the strands congealed back in with its brethren on the desk while the other flailed around his hand and stuck to a lampshade. “It seems to get stickier with the passage of time. Neat!”

“Here you go, dear. I hope the clean-up goes well. I’ve got some…” she said, setting the paper towel crate down and noticing her son’s hand now stuck to the lamp shade via his nasal expulsion. “…other things to do. Far away things. Ta!”

After about two hours of wrangling with paper towels and stiffening slime, Jack finally cleaned up the mess as best he could, filling two trash bags. He put his bed sheets in the wash, along with all his other clothes that had been soiled by the snot.

He also noticed that his suit had been slightly slimed, meaning that he’d have to see his girlfriend at the dry cleaners. He thought of Stacy and smiled. What would she think of his new superpower? He sniffed at his armpit and his face recoiled. His dad was right, he did smell like rotten cabbage.

He stepped into the shower and took the cap off the shampoo, taking a slight sniff, and discovered his dad had bought Fabreze-brand shampoo. The label read, “Carry the sweet smell of Fabreze with you wherever you go!” and had a woman on the label with a strained, obviously-forced smile.

Jack’s nostrils let loose and he filled the entire tub with his mucous. He discovered, much to his delight, that his mucous was not unlike soap in that it foamed and dissolved when exposed to water.

Much to his horror, he noticed that it left a smell like concentrated rotten cabbage. However, he also noticed that it left the surface much cleaner than it had appeared before he sneezed. He would have to talk to his mom about the bathroom cleaning schedule. As he got dressed, he checked his room to make sure he hadn’t missed any of the slime. Remembering the water trick, he grabbed a spray bottle and cleaned all the surfaces in his room and left them all sparkling, but reeking of concentrated rotten cabbage.

He shrugged, grabbed his suit, and left the house.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * As a person’s sense of smell will tend to familiarize itself with scents in their immediate vicinity, Jack’s sense of his own odor lessened as he walked down his street to the workplace of his girlfriend, Spittin Dry Cleaners. The owner of the establishment, Doug Spittin, had offered to change his name on a bet and lost.

Jack waltzed in and collided with his dad, who was exiting.

“Whoa, you’ve been here the whole…ahh…” he started to sneeze as he got a whiff of his Fabreeze-scented father.

His father dove into a tuck and roll maneuver that accomplished nothing in getting out of the way of the pyroclastic flow from Jack’s nostrils. His dad was now covered in the rancid-smelling goop, as was a significant portion of the floor.

Stacy, Jack’s girlfriend, watching and smelling the manifestation of her deepest overtime horrors, backed into the “Employees Only” room slowly.

Doug, the owner, cackled.

“Hee hee hee,” his glee really wasn’t infectious. “I’m making my daughter clean that up. Stacy! Get out here!”

Stacy came out wearing a scuba mask and carrying a bucket and sponge.

“Hey Stacy! You look great today!” Jack offered, wiping his nose on his sleeve and leaving a visible trail.

Stacy looked at Jack’s face, then the slime trail extending from his nose to his arm, then back to his face again.

“Nope,” she said, dropping the bucket and sponge on the floor and exiting.

As the bucket dropped, water spilled from it and reacted with the mucous, causing it to bubble, spat, and create a smell at least five times worse than Jack. After the initial reaction, it left a surface that was undeniably much cleaner and sparkly than it had ever appeared while in the possession of Spitin Dry Cleaners.

Doug watch the reaction and its aftermath with amazement. He grabbed the bucket, filled it up with water and then dumped it over Jack’s dad, causing Jack’s dad to fizzle for a few moments and then emerge cleaner than he had ever been, but reeking of rotten cabbage.

“Augh,” Jack’s dad moaned. “I feel…violated.”

“It’s a panacea!” Doug exclaimed. “And he’s dry!”

Jack’s dad didn’t show a trace of water on himself or the suit, or anywhere near him. He lay in a cathedral of cabbage-reeking clean.

“Actually a panacea would heal people,” Jack stated matter-of-factly.

“Your snot is a panacea for my bank account. Come with me!” Doug grabbed Jack by his remarkably spotless collar and led him through three sets of employees-only doors. Back in this room, hidden from all outsiders, were articles of clothing with stains far beyond the cleaning power of Doug’s most toxic chemicals: the room where clothes were laid to die, or at least be forgotten with pricey delays billed to the customers. After all, the customer was expected to pay for the storage of their maligned clothes.

Jack’s nostrils were assaulted by the Fabreeze-laden chemicals of the Dry Cleaning Business. He began a succession of rapid sneezing until every surface was dripping with Jack’s phlegm, including Doug.

Doug struck a match and waited for the fire alarms to activate while Jack struggled to breathe.

Gasping, Jack said, “Perhaps applying water isn’t the best idea here.”

“Shut up, Jack,” Doug said, holding up the match and the smoke in the vicinity of the sprinklers. “I’m going to die rich or else.”

“But the combustion reaction will…” Jack started to say as he felt himself lifted by a wall of the unfathomable stench of his snot.

Doug hadn’t put much money into upkeep or overhead on his business or his building, so Jack flew through the largely tarpaper ceiling and landed on his ass in a more reinforced part of the roof with an uncomfortable thud. He watched the green mist swirling around him and noticed his skin feeling remarkably tingly, but smelling like cabbage contemplating suicide.

He ambled over to the hole in the ceiling, fanning the green mist away and hearing the sprinklers sputter. As he peered over the edge, the roof collapsed under him and he fell through it, noticing his body’s survival instinct kick in so that he always flipped and twisted to land on his ass.

“Ow,” he said as he got up, rubbing his puckered posterior.

The sprinklers had quit. Jack’s eyes wandered at all the previously soiled clothes and marveled at their crisp-looking cleanliness. Every stain had been overpowered by Jack’s odiousness.

“Doug, you okay?” Jack asked the general area.

Doug was nowhere to be immediately found in the greenish fog. Someone groaned and hacked.

Jack tripped over a lump and discovered Doug on the floor as the mist continued to dissipate. Jack flipped in the air and landed on his ass.

“Dammit!” Jack sprang to his feet. “I’ve got to get me some butt pads.”

Doug continued to groan.

Jack attempted to rouse Doug to no avail. He found Doug to be surprisingly light as he hoisted him upward and took him back to the front office and customer reception area.

He noticed a small crowd outside the business staring upward and then covering their faces in horror as they abdicated the area. The green mist wasn’t lighter than air, Jack observed as the green clouds descended into the streets surrounding Spitin Clean, driving people away.

Propping Doug in a chair behind the counter, Jack quietly left to get some lunch at his favorite Korean restaurant. Doug slumped over, but the overall picture was all the more creepy due to his frozen grin. Finding it disarming at best, Jack turned the chair around so that Doug was facing away from a potential or returning customer.

While they didn’t live in a very busy or populated town, Jack was surprised at the attention the green cloud had mustered. Kids were daring their friends to go up close to it and touch it. Dogs turned tail and scurried from it. Skunks felt intimidated. The local pastor swore at it.

Jack emerged from it, looking surgically clean, making the overall effect all the more like something out of a B-grade horror movie.

The few folks who watched him emerge from the cloud, mainly the used car salespeople next door to the dry cleaner, saw him as the pristine “mark”, right down to his now squeaky-clean shoes. They were determined to sell him a car or die trying.

Jack lived in the basement of his parent’s house. He had ensconced there since graduating with a molecular biology degree a year ago. While all his teachers told him the recruiters would be beating a path to his door, Jack found that wasn’t the case. Aside from obsessing over his future life with Jennifer Doudna and their potentially genetically-perfect family, over time he retreated farther into the back corners of Netflix, where all the Marvel superhero movies run continuously.

“Hey, saw you glancing at the chartreuse Pacer. Want to take it out for a spin?” the car salespeople dangled keys at him then stepped back, covering their noses in horror.

Jack’s stomach dictated the need for food, so he sidestepped the keys and headed straight for the Korean restaurant. When he walked in, the full nostril assault of kimchi competed against Jack’s stench and lost, causing a momentary uproar in the kitchen.

Noting his aura of cleanliness, the owner of the restaurant, Cho-Hee, initially wondered if he had had a date and was basking in the afterglow of a momentary conversion to good hygiene, then she got a whiff of him.

“You smell like the toilet after my husband uses it,” she said, trying not to recoil her face. “On a bad day.”

“Can you please give me my usual, Cho-Hee?” Jack asked.

To his surprise, Cho-Hee handed him a bag on the spot.

“One of my cooks came in this afternoon talking about a green cloud near Doug’s place. He kind of figured it was you,” she said, with an awkward smile. “We figured you would be by so we got an order ready…to go.”

When she opened her mouth to say “go”, she inevitably tasted Jack’s odor on her tongue and started a fit of gagging.

“Please don’t eat it here,” she sputtered between gags.

Jack walked home. On his way, he tried calling Stacy, only to learn that the number she had given him was for the Dry Cleaner. He stopped back to check on Doug.

“Hey Doug?” he asked. As Doug was still sitting in the chair.

To his relief, Doug turned around and smiled.

“There’s my future partner!” he beamed, ushering Jack back into his storeroom.

“How are you feeling?” Jack asked cautiously as he allowed himself to be led back into the dark corners where dirty clothes would normally quiver with glee.

“Couldn’t be better, except for my sense of smell, which seems to be completely gone. Weird,” Doug stood back and appraised Jack’s appearance.

“You look…cleaner.”

“As do you,” Jack replied.

Doug brushed his fingers over the racks of recently cleaned clothes. “You saved me about $40,000, and that’s not even counting the civil lawsuits. I thought I was going to have to get a bunch of “controlled” substances in order to clean these suckers.”

“Controlled?” Jack asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Banned chemicals,” Doug snorted. “The EPA won’t let me buy the chemicals that actually work anymore, due to the ozone layer and overall toxicity and all that shit. However, those are the only chemicals that will actually remove some of those stains. I can only get them through Turkmenistan. Sure, you don’t want to freebase them, and you have to be careful using them, but you also don’t want to look like a schmuck when you return an item to a customer with an apology.

“Makes a guy look weak,” he shrugged.

“I always thought you were kind of a wuss, too. So did Stacy. I’m pretty sure that’s the only reason she decided to go out with you.”

“We didn’t…actually go out,” Jack said quietly.

“Whoa,” Doug’s eyes widened. “Stacy seemed really excited when she told me how you were planning to take her to Broadway to see Hamilton. What happened?”

Jack looked a bit despondent.

“She told me about her friend and how her friend had always wanted to see Hamilton from the first time it opened. Her friend had bought the soundtrack, memorized all of the original cast’s biographies and even created small shrines in her home for each cast member in a place that corresponds uniquely with their fung shui vortices according to their Vedic astrological charts and their interlapping crystal harmony.

“I figured, how can I compete with fung shui? How can I, a mere molecular biologist, compete with the bold audacity that propelled Marie Kondo? How can I compete with interlapping crystal harmony?”

“Damn dude,” Doug tried not to laugh, but not very well.

Jack straightened himself up to as close as he could get to full height, not noticing Doug’s stifled laughter. “She essentially begged me to let her friend go to the show. I did what I thought was the right thing and offered to take her friend instead.”

Doug recoiled from placing what was to be a conciliatory pat on Jack’s shoulder.

“You…what?”

“I told Stacy her friend sounds cool, and Stacy got mad,” Jack looked like he was about to cry. “Really mad. She then ordered me to give her both tickets, along with the reservations for the flight and hotel, and some extra money, you know, for food and stuff.

“I wanted to be the nice guy,” Jack shrugged. “So I handed them over to her and pleaded with her to forgive me.”

Doug snorted some more.

“She took them, and then walked away from me,” Jack recalled mournfully, then brightened. “She then came back to me, gave me a kiss on the cheek, and said she forgave me. So she didn’t go with me. She took her friend.”

Doug looked flabbergasted, mumbling to himself, “Damn, that girl’s cold.”

Jack smiled, “She told me how much she and her friend enjoyed it.”

Doug shook his head a few times, looked at Jack like he was about to say something, then didn’t.

“Well, okay,” Doug shook his head some more, took a deep breath and let it out through a long whistle.

“So here’s what we can do from now on. Every afternoon, say at around 4-ish, right after we close. You come in through the back entrance, I’ll hit you up with Fabreeze, and you’ll sneeze over whatever I throw at you. Ill split whatever profits we earn with you 50/50. Deal?”

Jack considered carefully.

“You’ll run the store and maintain everything? I still want to continue to do my science.”

“Sure, you go science the rest of the day but every day around 4-ish, you come here.”

“That works for me. That’ll make my dad happy that I have a job. He’ll be even happier that I’m getting out of the house once in a while. That way I can buy more science stuff.”

Jack then relayed the genetic methodology employed in creating his newly acquired phlegmatic discharge. Doug followed along for the first ten seconds then drifted off to another part of the store. Jack, being used to giving presentations to his former lab colleagues, thought this disclosure was far better than his usual presentations in that the recipients stayed awake. He followed Doug around and talked in a steady monotone drone, much like his professors had.

When he had finished the presentation, Jack waited to hear if Doug had any questions.

“You’re still here? Go have your lunch. I’m busy,” Doug handed him his take-out and ushered him out the front door.

As he left, he bumped into Stacy.

“Wow Jack, you’ve cleaned up,” she smiled, initially taking in his appearance before getting a whiff of the residual green cloud within the store. “Holy warthogs! What is that?”

She brought her hand to her nose and stepped back to cough. She reassessed the store around her.

“The store seems…a lot cleaner,” she said through her nose, to which she had fashioned a clothespin.

Doug emerged, beaming. “Oh the smell? You’ll get used to it. It’s Jack.”

Jack wasn’t sure whether to smile or grimace.

“When he sneezes,” Doug began to explain, then fiddled with his hands as if trying to find the right words.

He grabbed a can of Fabreeze and sprayed it in Jack’s direction.

“Watch!”

Jack felt the nasal twitch as soon as his olfactory epithelium was triggered by the tiniest amount of Fabreeze. His receptivity to the smell, rather than becoming desensitized to it, was becoming more sensitive.

“Fabreze has sensitizer properties. Better call OSHA,” Jack thought grudgingly as his body inhaled deeply before the sneeze.

The expulsion of snot emerged in a heart-shaped pattern from his upraised nostrils and expanded outward. Jack, now accustomed to seeing time slow down in his “superhero” state, watched as each droplet expanded upon impact, covering everything around him, including Doug and Stacy, with a slick coating of his essence. He twisted around as he sneezed, just to see if he could cover an even greater surface area.

“Check off that box,” he said to himself, oddly satisfied that everything within eyesight was shiny.

Stacy blinked a few times, then scowled as she spit.

“You eat way too much kimchi,” she spat as she stomped to the back of the store.

Doug blinked a few times as well.

“Fortunately, I’ve got plant misters!” he said, handing two bottles to Jack. “Come, my boy. We must mist!”

Jack set his lunch bag down on one of the few pristine surfaces and then got to work as Doug continued to maniacally yell, “MIST!”, creating sparkles and green clouds wherever they sprayed. He theorized the reaction being due to sodium from all the MSG Cho-Hee poured on the food, that or his new ability was somehow stripping loose sodium ions from the axons connecting the neurons in his brain.

He decided it must be the former, or so he hoped.

Stacy came back out with another mop bucket and mop and looked around her, stunned by the green cloud but even more surprised by how sparkly everything appeared. Before she could draw the mop defensively, Doug sprayed her.

“It’s a dry cleaner’s dream!” Doug exclaimed as he soaked her into sparkles.

Stacy removed the clothespin and paused before taking an inhalation.

“I don’t want to do this,” she groaned, and then inhaled deeply, launching into a series of ragged coughs and gags.

“Jack,” she sputtered as the coughing began to abate. “What did you do?”

Jack turned slowly toward her, doing his best to imitate the superhero stance and stare before a decisive action scene in any Marvel movie.

“I did what I had to, Stacy,” he said, adding an imaginary tip of his hat. “Nothing more.”

Stacy answered him with her best attempt at a single raised eyebrow, while hacking like a struggling science fiction writer having just swallowed a kleenex.

“Okay, but what I really did was…” and Jack launched into a more gesticulated version of describing his research, hoping it made him appear more macho.

Stacy, to everyone’s surprise, followed along, asking, “Why didn’t you notice the clearly not subtle differences in the genetic sequences between the hagfish and the tarantula when you were preparing your CRISPR cuts? Although I suppose reading the myriad variations of the same four letters gets to be a drag after a while, even for someone like you.”

“I’ll admit I was excited and I just wanted to get this done,” he said. “I may have thought changing the structure of a single protein or two wouldn’t make that much difference. Plus, I also entertained the possibility that the Democratic Republic of Korea had just sent me a new species, endemic to Kim Jong Il’s bedroom. They’re like that.”

Stacy grimaced, “Wow, next thing you’ll be buddying up to Dennis Rodman.”

“They sent me an autographed Chicago Bulls poster with the shipment.”

Stacy slapped her forehead, turned, ducked her head outside, took a deep sniff of untainted air, and came back to the conversation.

“The smell is not actually that bad once you get used to it,” she said to Doug, avoiding Jack’s gaze.

“What smell?” Doug responded, to which Stacy nodded slowly, taking a careful sniff as she dismissed her dad’s anosmia.

“It’s definitely you, but with an overload of Cho-Hee’s partially-digested kimchi,” she paused, noting her blindingly clean apparel and surroundings, “Does that explain the sodium-water reaction? She drowns that stuff in MSG.

“I was training to be a sommelier at Cordon Bleu, while pursuing my double major of genetics and exploitive marketing, and working here,” she said, adjusting her shoulders to bear the weight of her enlarged ego. “I know how to smell.”

At that moment, a dog came within five feet of the door, yipped in horror and began wiping its scent-maligned nose against the mud outside, backing away as it did so.

Stacy cackled, “Congratulations Jack, you’ve invented the first truly green cleanser. Doug, have you considered the exploitive marketing we could do with this?”

“I figure we can pull at least $40,000 in our first month,” Doug responded, studying old cleaning chemicals in the shop.

“If it’s marketed as green,” she continued, “all the hippies will bring their dry cleaning here and they won’t care at all about the smell.”

“Do you think it will work better when he gets a cold?” Doug asked.

Stacy rubbed her chin, “That’s actually a great question. I have another question though.”

She went up to Jack and placed both of her hands on his shoulders.

“Have you ever tried Middle Eastern food? They use a lot of mint,” she asked. “Americans like mint more than cabbage.”

“Is that a request for a dinner date?” Jack perked up in the hope of further inflating her ego.

Stacy’s smile slithered across her face.

“Only if you’re buying,” she gave him a cautious peck on the cheek and then smelled herself.

As the afternoon waned onward, Jack listened with decreasing interest to Stacy and Doug’s plotting of how best to exploit his newfound powers. After about an hour, Jack noticed his stomach grumbling and remembered his take-out.

“I should eat,” Jack mumbled to no one in particular.

Stacy looked over at him and then nodded toward the door. She waited until he left before soaking the store in the scent of Fabreeze.

Jack, on his way home, wasn’t certain of how to feel. Granted, he now had superpowers. But it looked like they would be used in a capitalistic businesslike manner bordering on outright exploitation, which might still be cool given he was able to date Stacy.

He wondered what he would wear that evening as he came to his front stoop, which was inhabited by a DHL package addressed to him.

He opened the package to reveal an additional signed Dennis Rodman Chicago Bulls poster, protectively wrapped around a vial containing the spider eggs he originally requested, and an apologetic receipt that said he could keep the hagfish eggs as a complimentary free gift.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Jack didn’t think tonight’s date with Stacy was going to go well.

The last few dates hadn’t gone that well either, in Jack’s opinion anyway, which he learned didn’t matter that much in his relationship with Stacy.

Tonight’s date would be, to say the least, complicated, by the emergence of a four-inch wide single opisthosoma, complete with their own six-shooter spinnerets, just above the crack of his butt cheeks.

At the very least, he would need to get some new pants. He exhaled a deep sigh, cursing Stan Lee and Jack Kirby for making it all look so seductive and easy. He began to wonder how he had been so crazy to think that the opisthosoma and spinnerets would appear in his forearms, making him at the very least look like a steroid-fed Popeye. Maybe with some additional genetic-level tweaking, it might be possible. But that would also mean a significant part of his digestive system would theoretically need to be redirected to his arms.

“Gross,” he thought to himself shuddering.

Currently an even bigger problem were the pedipalps coming out of either side of his neck. Granted, now they kind of looked like enhanced mutton-chops or really steroidal sternocleidomastoids, which he had seen some hipsters and roid boys sporting about five years ago. Stacy might appreciate the retro look, or not.

“Everybody’s going to want this look,” he said to himself as he checked out his slightly more beefed-up profile in the mirror, trying to hide the spinnerets poking from his butt.

He was kicking himself that he didn’t research or even consider the additional spider appendages his body would necessitate after the assimilation of the spider DNA into his own gene pool, which still had hagfish mixed in with it.

When he had sneezed earlier that morning, he discovered that the spray was all caught and kept in a compressed state by his newly formed pedipalps. He tried it repeatedly, but not a single expansive speck escaped.

“Huh,” he thought. “I wonder how that’ll effect the dry cleaners.”

After cutting holes in both his underpants and pants to allow for his opisthosoma, he was about to walk outside and thought better of it, grabbing a loose-fitting overcoat as well.

He had also checked his strength that morning, as additional strength was the glory of any superhero. He had been able to open a jar of salsa for his mother without any issues.

“The mutton chops are a new look for you, dear,” his mom commented, dishing out breakfast. “They’re a bit…weird.”

His dad peeked out from behind his Investors Business Daily.

“You look like Michael Nesmith when he was in the Monkees,” his dad said, returning to his paper. “With intense sternocleidomastoids. I know what those are. I read ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’. The movie was an intense chore, but the book was fantastic.”

“I was hoping that I looked a bit more like Hugh Jackman as Wolverine,” Jack offered as a reply.

“Meh,” his dad responded. “Who needs that superhero crap?”

Jack’s grip tightened on his silverware, marveling in his strength as he noticed the silverware being molded more to the shape of his fingers, which he only just noticed were covered with tiny dark hairs with them being white around his knuckles. His heightened sense of touch also registered that the temperature of the silverware increased about twenty degrees in response to the enhanced molecular activity that came from it suddenly being compressed and stretched.

He looked around the new kitchen, with updated appliances, that had come about with the profits from his partnership with Spittin Clean. In the past two months, he had also been able to expand the living and dining rooms and bought himself the enhanced virtual reality set he had been pining for at Christmas. He was pretty self-satisfied, even if he wasn’t a real superhero.

On Stacy’s suggestion, he had tried switching from Korean food to Middle Eastern food for a day or so, but Doug complained that his customers hated the new odor even more. A few of the customers likened it to the taste in your mouth the morning after chain-smoking a pack of menthol cigarettes. As bad the “old” smell was, his customers were more than happy to pay the premium price for it since it was a green dry cleaners as advertised. With the new smell, the customers didn’t trust it and suspected that Doug had switched to dry cleaning chemicals from the third world again.

Jack was more than happy to go back to eating kimchi again, as the Middle Eastern food also gave him explosive gas. He worried slightly whether his food tastes would become more aggressive with his now sharing genes with a hagfish and a spider, and would thusly require his mom to purchase Sriracha.

He gave a momentary shudder which, with his additional spider-like strength amounting to being proportionately 250 times stronger than he was yesterday, sent an earthquake through the kitchen and caused the rickety chair he sat on to become even more rickety.

His dad, noticing the unusual vibration in the floor, again peeked as Jack from behind his newspaper.

“Something on your mind, son?” his dad asked, now completely used to Jack’s odor since Jack had coated the inside of the water tank of his father’s CPAP with his slime. He hoped his dad wouldn’t notice and, to his luck, his dad didn’t notice anything different.

Jack shrugged.

“Your mother and I are proud of you, Jack,” his dad beamed, making a space on his lap for his mom to delicately perch. “You’ve managed to turn your life around into a fiscally responsible mode of living rather than sucking us dry like you used to with all your fancy-sounding degrees.”

“I just received one degree, Dad,” Jack seethed. “Your other son is working on his post-doc. He’s the one draining the family coffers.”

His dad ignored him, adding, “Now if we could just get you enrolled into an MBA program like your old man, then we’d really start to see some improvements around here. You might even move out of the house to the far side of town. Or even the next town. Or the next state.

“Have you ever been to Idaho? Housing is dirt cheap,” he concluded, taking a deep sniff and rattling his paper at him as his mom seated herself on his dad’s lap.

“Your father and I have always dreamed of having our own private bowling alley. However, your bedroom is in the way. But if you moved out…?” his mom teased his father by dangling a ripe strawberry within inches of his mouth. “Oh, we’d be living the dream!”

Jack sighed and finished his breakfast, ignoring his parents as best he was able.

Even though he wasn’t expected until around 4 pm, Jack still wanted to see if he could impress Stacy with his new look.

Jack headed back up to his bedroom to check out his appearance in his room one more time. As he did so, he began to wonder if it would be possible for him to further alter his DNA into something with retractable claws, not unlike Wolverine. He briefly thought about how much easier it would be for him to open a bag of chips.

“Oh Jack, I never knew that a man shearing open a bag of chips with his untrimmed adamantium nails could be so…seductive,” he imagined Stacy cooing up to him as he demonstrated his newest superpower without exploding the contents of the bag over the floor as he had on their last date, much to Stacy’s disappointment and disgust. She had demanded payment for the rest of their date in advance, as she had on their last five dates.

His mind snapped back to this present as his body tensed in response to a squirrel running across a tree branch outside his window. In that one precise moment, his entire existence was devoted to hunting that squirrel and sucking its body dry. He suddenly felt fangs appearing in his jaws, poking their way against the inside of his jawline.

He shook his head and released his fixation on the prospect of his next meal.

“Huh, wasn’t expecting that hunter instinct to be quite so...focused.”

He left his house, leaving his parents arguing over the particulars of future architectural plans for his bedroom, and only walked a few feet on the sidewalk when he distinctly, convincingly, overwhelmingly knew that something was not quite proper in the way of the neighborhood as it should be.

He hoped it was his “Spidey Sense,” as it felt different from his “Haggy” sense, during which he felt an insatiable urge to expel mucous.

All his senses were heightened, which unfortunately included the Haggy sense. He could read the street signs from a half mile distance. He could smell the hair of a dog from three blocks away and, using his enhanced hearing, echolocate its precise location. He knew, that should the occasion require it, he could propel a snot-laden mass to that precise location.

He felt godlike.

With all of his senses on high-alert and opisthosoma with spinnerets tingling, he walked to Spittin Clean to check on things. He suspected something was not as it should be in that location.

“I’m saying that you signed a six-month contract,” came an unfamiliar voice with a heavy Slavic accent, as he neared the cleaners. “I haven’t been paid in the last two months. And what is that god awful cabbage-like smell lurking underneath the spring meadow cushion of Fabreeze?”

“That’s because we haven’t had a need for your chemicals,” Jack heard Doug’s voice. “I’ve been shipping them back to the main warehouse in Turkmenistan, per the contract and waiting for the appropriate reimbursement, which I haven’t yet received.

“The smell is…” Doug paused as Jack entered the lobby. “Jack! We don’t need you until the afternoon. What brings you here?”

Jack had found the danger embodied in the somewhat menacing Turkmen accountant. He took a long sniff and sensed, from the heightened adrenaline coming from the accountant’s pores, that this guy was there only to make trouble for Spittin Clean. Jack noticed he had a forboding purchase order receipt in his hand and that he wasn’t afraid to use it.

“I needed…” he saw Stacy poke her head around from behind the main storeroom door. She had done her hair in a French-twist with a few runaway curls that Jack found romantically enticing.

“Pants,” he finished his sentence as he watched Stacy come fully into the room.

At that point, the instinctual reproductive characteristics of male spiders, mixed with hagfish and human, took over and Jack’s pedipalps released the entire built-up phlegmy mass of three sneezes in a Hail Mary shot toward Stacy.

Stacy was less than impressed as she shrieked and hid behind the door.

“That’s new,” Doug shrugged.

Jack then spun around, releasing a sticky string of silk from his hindquarters directed toward the accountant. As soon as the silk made contact with him, Jack’s silk production went into overdrive and he found himself spinning the accountant round and round with his silk encasing the accountant in something not unlike a silky cocoon…but quite a bit stickier, not unlike Jack’s nasal expulsions.

As soon as the accountant was made immobile, Jack felt his fangs once again force themselves against the inside of his mouth and his stomach transform into a high-powered vacuum, far beyond any conventional notion of hungry.

His hunger had taken over everything else, so he headed out for some kimchi, leaving wisps of webbing behind him as he left, randomly interlocking things around him into an elongated weblike pattern.

Doug’s eyes went from Jack, to the accountant, to the mass of phlegm expanding at the storeroom door, to the shrieking of his daughter, and then to the weblike pattern he saw reflected in the sunlight outside his business.

“You were saying?” Doug asked the accountant, brushing the last two minutes aside for his therapist to make sense of later.

The accountant remained immobile except for his mouth.

“That was unusual,” the accountant stammered. “I can’t move my arms, or even puff out my chest as I do to make myself look larger and more threatening.”

Doug raised the spray bottle.

“If I spray you, we’ll call it even?” Doug asked.

“Will that get rid of this…stuff?” the accountant asked, taking rapid gasps of air. “It’s honestly kind of hard to breathe.”

Doug sprayed the goo stuck on the door as a demonstration, causing the door to fizzle and pop as the wood was stripped of its paint, leaving the greenish cloud hovering around the store.

The accountant watched, mesmerized by the cloud and the cleanliness beneath until its odor reached his nostrils. At that point, he started coughing, but it was more of an attempt to cough as his lungs were compressed enough by the constricting web that he couldn’t inhale to power the cough out of his body.

“Do you want me to free you or not?” Doug asked again, dangling the spray bottle from his pinky.

The accountant continued with raw gasps, “You say you shipped the unused chemicals back to Turkmenistan? I can trust you on this?”

“I have the postal and custom receipts,” Doug smiled, trying not to look too smug.

“Please spray me,” the accountant gave a final gasp as the first water droplets hit the web, sending yellow sparks throughout the store. The sodium-water reaction didn’t disappoint as the webbing dissolved in a yellowish-green cloud.

“The yellow color is from the sodium,” Stacy remarked as she entered the room with a few more spray bottles tucked under her fingers. “Sodium is what’s behind yellow-burning fireworks, also the sodium lights you still see in street lights.”

“What’s the green color from then?” her dad asked, nonchalantly spraying away the final bits of web as he grabbed another bottle from his daughter.

Stacy gave a grimace which her father noticed.

“Must be Jack,” Stacy turned her back to her dad as she dissolved the last bit of goo from the door. “Hey, did you notice it can strip paint when it’s concentrated in higher amounts? Leaving the wood in a pristine, unfinished state?”

Doug cackled, “Only with water-based paint. On oil-based paint it has little effect, or none that I’ve seen so far. Although maybe his web stuff might.”

“Such a figure would be a monumental addition to Turkmenistan’s economy,” the accountant mumbled mostly to himself as rubbed his hands together to get the feeling back into them.

Stacy donned a set of nitrile gloves and carefully gathered a mass of Jack’s webbing from outside the store.

“We can test it!” she announced, beaming to her dad as she presented the bits of webbing.

“That’s my girl!” her father beamed back.

The accountant showed himself out the store while the father and daughter made further exploitive plans and tests, not before spraying the entire store, and parts of the accountant, with Fabreze.

Jack found using chopsticks to be so much easier now.

He had just wolfed down his third container of kimchi when he spotted the accountant outside of the Korean restaurant, peeking inside.

Jack felt his fangs poke against his cheeks again in response, but then quickly dismissed that as he dumped a fourth container down his throat.

The accountant noticed Jack and waved.

“Have you ever been to Ashgabat, the jewel of Turkmenistan? We have a giant gold dog statue of an Alabay, the President’s favorite breed of dog,” he bragged as he began to cross the street to reach Jack.

“I can propel a ball of snot that will immobilize you where you stand,” Jack bragged back, feeling his pedipalps palpitating.

The accountant thought about that for a minute, paused in the middle of a traffic lane. Jack sensed a rapidly approaching truck about to flatten the accountant and, Jack noticed more keenly, a large bag of Cho-Hee’s culinary contributions in one arm.

Jack’s mind went into trigonometric and Newtonian physics overdrive, calculating angles and speeds of trajectories as he spun around and machine-gunned six different webs from his butt, stopping the truck an inch from the accountant with screeching tires and minimal, if any, personal or property damage.

The accountant staggered backward and began to drop the bag. Jack again spun around and snagged the bag with a web, spinning again and snapping it back into his arms with a percussive whip-like sound cracking against the pavement and echoing off the surrounding buildings.

“Have a nice day,” Jack garbled as he shoved the contents of one of the containers from the bag in his mouth, looking forward to his date with Stacy.

He sensed it would go well, but he still needed new pants.