The Mighty

By Mitch James

Brooks thought that when I started only being able to do it at home that it was something he did or didn’t do, but the truth was, I got so dependent on the grotesque, of seeing them and them seeing me, that I could no longer cum without them there.

We started young, as junior high sweethearts. He’d do anything for me, anything to me, and he did. By freshmen year, we’d fuck around anywhere. Cars of course, a cemetery. I tried anal the first time in my parents’ kitchen, up against the fridge. My mom and sister left to grab burgers. My cheeks were flushed when they returned, and Brooks wouldn’t look my mother in the eyes. We ate in silence, my little sister reading the room but clearly confused. Then my mom stood, cleaned up, slapped my mouth, and told Brooks it was time to leave, to ride his bike home.

At bedtime, I told her I’d been going to church and reading the bible, and she knew it. I told her we weren’t having sex, that I was waiting for marriage, and we weren’t at that point because I was. I was in that oil slick of puberty and God where I believed somehow being fucked in the ass didn’t count. Ultimately, I came back around. We fucked our way through senior year, then attended the same college, where we moved in together sophomore year, cheated on each other junior year, and broke up but didn’t stop fucking until graduation, when we took jobs in different states and, for years, sent naked pictures of ourselves to each other from anywhere other than the privacy of our own homes. Christ, how many times had he seen my tits, the same pose with my ass protruding, my legs softly crossed like resting chopsticks? And his cock, how many times, how many angles, how many different shades of light? How many things can one man put beside a penis to prove its size to one who has had every hole stuffed by it already? We never ceased, not through other partners, the death of family, one suicide attempt.

He changed jobs, moved closer, our years of stimulation like a steady breeze on coals, and there we were again, in café and bar bathrooms, making each other nut, getting off while driving and on hiking trails or against trees in parks in the dark. And in our room, when we finally got a place and it all worked out. And it was. Working.

I call her Mabel, the first one I met. It was late one weekend, and I was on Molly. Brooks had me bent over the bed. He’d already had me once in the Cane’s Chicken parking lot, yet there I was, arms behind my back, wrists knotted in his fist, saying things I knew would spur him on, things I meant, and through vision thinned with tears, in the corner of our room, sitting atop a stack of boxes still unpacked from the move, legs peeled back like something in bloom, was a woman like you’d see in those western tintypes or their replicas from amusement parks. But she was the real deal. I could see it in the chemise, the corset, the petticoat folding back like an octopus opening, could see it in the wail of black hair between her legs. She reached in and worked herself as she watched me take. We locked eyes, and I saw something there I still cannot name. A bond that knows no time or space. It was as if her gaze choked my soul yet held me in a way that proved everything had always been alright.

I came so hard I thrust Brooks out of me. It was so forceful that he came too. I fell over and he slipped back against the wall. He laughed. I looked in the corner. Mabel was gone. I felt Brook’s cum going cold on the back of my thigh and calf. He just leaned against the wall and laughed, his dick sinking with each heartbeat like a fat slug. He said something about how that had never happened. There was a kind of pride in him I’d not seen before, a swelling of the spirit, a glow like he’d accomplished something he didn’t know was in him. And I laughed. I laughed so hard I cried, and I could tell Brooks didn’t know what to do, didn’t know if my laughing was good or bad. Then he didn’t know either, about his own laughing.

At first, simply thinking about Mabel was enough. We stopped at a Flying J on our way to Cedar Point, and he took me in the handicap stall. I tried to focus on him and the feeling and the danger, hearing other men coming in and out of the bathroom, knowing at least one man noticed me walk into the stall a couple of minutes ahead of Brooks, that our entering and exiting would be recorded, how hard it was not to make a sound as he tried to see if he could hit deep enough to break me. Despite my focusing on all that had always gotten me off, I struggled to cum. Then, like the residue of something tide-born, Mabel surfaced, and it’s when I saw her, opened and in pleasure in my mind’s eye, that I felt the lighting inside, the flash-hot spark then warm pooling and its blooming. I was not silent. My high-pitched sounds stuttered like ricocheted bullets around the subway tile. One man’s pissing stopped as he listened. Brooks was still going, gentler, focusing in his own ways on getting off. The piss began again. Brooks finished inside me. I walked out first, then him.

Mabel in my mind was sufficient for a while. Then it wasn’t. I couldn’t get off to her or the feeling of Brooks or the risks we took. I began making excuses as to why we needed to have sex at home, about how we were in our thirties now and going to jail for public fornication wasn’t cool like when we were young. Brooks loved me. The risks we took turned him on, kept him famished, feeling fasted despite his feasting, but it was me, my sounds, taste, how the inside of me became his first and only home; that’s what he loved and needed and so he embraced our suddenly vanilla sex life, doggy and missionary on the bed, cuffs and a new excursion into rope play. He was happy to have me. I was all he needed, and I faked and faked my orgasms on the sheets I changed every Sunday and waited, watching the corner for Mabel. But she never returned. Instead, it was someone else, something else.

I call it Mighty, its first appearance arresting. I could not move or breathe. I was on my side, my wrists in a struggler’s knot, the tips of Brooks’ fingers snaked into the smooth bowl of my ilium. He worked in methodical strokes as Mighty appeared in front of the boxes in the corner. Brooks noticed I stopped making sounds, stopped my slight movements. Sometimes we played bored and ignored, where one of us would ignore the other while they did what they could to get the other’s attention. He thought that was what was happening. He chuckled from his guts, positioned himself to cause damage, then went hard.

Mighty is a blend of living matter, a base not unlike a mound of earth that shutters like the silky undulations of a stingray or the flinching of an elephant’s ear, its body like the trunk of a tree or tight human torso, arms like roundworms floating in formaldehyde, its hands like mycelium or round patches of neural networks or Lanikai, flexing in a slow opening and closing, not unlike breathing, and its head, a swollen bulbous thing, fungal in its girth and shape and too big for its trunk, collapses to one side like a lame dead tongue. Black hole dots for eyes. The entirety of it flexes and relaxes, flexes and relaxes as if breathing.

I was locked into all of Mighty that first time, the grappling hands, the lethargic sway of the arms, I fell and fell into the black hole eyes, and as I did, I came and came and came, but no part of me moved, Brooks still doing all he could to break me, body hammering, his fingers like barbs, lifting me off the bed and into him with every thrust, his sweat buckshot across my back. Orgasm after orgasm piled inside me like an electric flotsam on the crest of crashing waves, one, then another, then another, and the thrusting, our bodies like continental plates smashing, grinding, making mountains, and Mighty reaching and lulling, eyes unblinking.

When I could be filled no more, not by cock or orgasm or absence of air, my lungs collapsed like an old bag, I burst, gulped air, converted it to a scream. I released all of it, what Mighty made me feel and Brooks made me feel and all the orgasms that climbed each other to be one. I wailed. I belted. I tugged at the ropes. Brooks pulled out and danced around me in a panic. He reached for the knots, then bounded away from my frantic writhing, from my howling solar flare of orgasm, everything about me expectorated like a collision of stars. And as it exited, as it launched from the small capsule of my body and took up space in infinity, the tide inside drifted out again.

The blood made it difficult for Brooks to release the knots. Freed and in his arms, he asked questions and kissed the front of my head as if testing for fever, as if I were mad. He was terrified and apologetic and erect. I reached out and touched his cock. He recoiled. Took my hand. Said no. No. Relax. Just stop a minute. He asked what was wrong with me. He held and pushed me away at the same time. I felt I was stretched everywhere, in all directions, but belonged nowhere.
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Mighty became the only thing that could make me cum. The thought of it, its vastness, all it implied, a grotesqueness so profoundly crippling that it empowered. I didn’t need Brooks and he knew. I’d let him take me, and I’d fake it, but he heard the real ones when I showered or in the living room. I didn’t try and hide it. I’d open to myself like Mabel, and enter, and Mighty would watch in its crooked way. I rarely left the house and, instead, swallowed myself whole, Mighty my audience. Brooks left and stopped calling and never sent pics, and I learned how to be full on a diet of myself, of my meaning. And I came, and I cum, and when I open to myself, which is to open to it all, I watch closely the corners. 

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​Mitch James is a Professor of Composition and Literature at Lakeland Community College in Kirtland, OH, the Editor-at-Large at Great Lakes Review, and the owner of The Write Methods (LLC), where he facilitates therapeutic and creative writing workshops to guide others in experiencing the transformative power of the written word. Mitch is the author of the novels Seldom Seen: A Miner’s Tale (Sunbury Press), and Young Men, Cry (forthcoming from Cornerstone Press), and was a finalist for the 2024 SmokeLong Quarterly Grand Micro and 2025 Blue Frog Flash Fiction Contests. He’s published works across the genres of short/flash/micro fiction, poetry, and academic scholarship. You can find his latest fiction in Lost Balloon, Bending Genres, and SmokeLong Quarterly, his poetry at Sheila-Na-Gig, and his scholarship at the Journal of Creative Writing Studies and New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing. Keep up with Mitch at mitchjamesauthor.com and @mitchjamesauthor.bsky.social.