Editor’s Note: here at DFO, many of us are not satisfied with the Super Bowl matchup. For some of us, this is because we hate both teams at a level that rivals a lefty’s hatred for regular-shaped scissors. For others, our seething hatred of one team is more than enough to overwhelm our relative indifference for the other, leading to a Super Bowl we simply have no interest in watching. As such, we’ve been fantasizing about scenarios that might take place that would prevent the game from being played at all. These are our stories.

————-

Its face, a twisted nest of limbs and digits, hung violently above the stadium. Those of us who stared transfixed upon the visage of the being found no eyes staring back. Vibrations wicked up from beneath its appendaged countenance, shaking both its own body and the structure that housed us and the teams we had gathered to watch. We must all offer our bodies to this prince of corpses, I heard my mind declare.

I fell in love with how it destroyed; slowly, and then all at once. It’s graceful seizures rocked the gravity of time. I tasted the tinny profile of blood from the back of my throat, but why? Ah, I was screaming. I had been screaming, for awhile now. The sound flaked out into the air like skin off a burn victim. Gradually my scream melted into the collective din of the crowd, forming a unified word: Brady.

His true form was more viscerally beautiful than we could have imagined. On the field, blood was pooling in the south end zone. The Chiefs defense had been celebrating an interception. Now, their pitiful mounds of fleshy pulp gushed red fluid onto the turf. Elsewhere, the Eagles offense could have been heard screaming if not for the failure of their lungs to force air through their prematurely terminated windpipes. Indeed, their gaping mouths were now gaping tracheas, open to the sunshine and feeling the razor touch of the wind.

Somehow I found myself cowering beneath my stadium seat. I had begun to pray, fitfully, to the god king Brady. He heard. Somehow, he heard. His gargantuan torso pivoted in my direction, idly eviscerating each section of stands that he rotated past.

A crippling pressure found the sides of my skull.

“You can come out now, it’s safe.” His words weren’t spoken, they were etched across the boundless expanse of space.

I could only imagine my reply, but he heard it all the same. “Why did you kill them?”

“When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a damn nail.” The logo in the center of the field lifted upwards, freed from its earthly prison. It expanded, posturing into a wide embrace of what remained of the stadium. Brady’s countless facial limbs reached for me, and I complied. Warmth filled my lungs, and a smile crept onto my face as my fragile bones were fractured by his touch. The rush of death was ecstasy as two of his many fingers eliminated the space between my scalp and jaw.

Brady continued. Retirement was a good look for him. Of course, if he couldn’t win the Lombardi anymore, nobody should.