I Was Bitten By a Radioactive Jesus

(continued from 2: My Secret Origin, continued)

As I shook her hand, a confused and somewhat alarmed expression took over her face. She seemed to smile for a moment, then said something that sounded like “Gnnrpphppt,” and one of her eyes popped right out of her head and landed on my shoe. I had killed her! I had accidentally done some kind of nightmarish Dim Mak Death Touch, interrupting her body’s meridians of life energy at the precise nanosecond that you would not wish to unless she were responsible for killing your elderly kung-fu master and had thus forced you to spend six grueling years undergoing an improbable regime of training under the tutelage of a cranky, one-legged vagabond who knew the ancient secrets of White Spider Death Touch Kung Fu. Horror exploded within my belly, and I lurched backward, but somehow I didn’t care to let go of her hand. She began to shake, then an amazing transformation occurred.

Her body stilled, and she stood there in graceful poise as an actual golden glow suffused her entire body. Her features settled into a “normal” arrangement and fingers sprouted delicately from her hands, tickling my palm as I held right hand in mine. Within moments she had lost any radiation-induced quirks of anatomy, and looked rather like a Laura Ashley model on her day off. She was almost as stunned as I, and I released her lovely hand as she rushed to look at herself in the window of the nearby yardage store. She began to weep, punctuated with little hiccup-like barks, and as she turned back toward me I expected to hear bitter words of blame that would settle on my heart like barnacles, troubling my sleep for the remainder of my sad, lonely days. But she embraced me, saying “nghangoo” softly, over and over again, which after a few moments I realized was “thank you” in the dialect of gratefully sobbing, miraculously healed small-town beauties. Her name is Sara, and she has the gentlest spirit of anyone I’ve ever known.

The next two days are a blur. She dragged me all over town to see her friends and her parents and her tall, wide brother. As people heard the news, they rushed to seek me out, swarming around me like morlocks on a dark night or children on a Calcutta street.

And I healed them. With great power comes great responsibility, as Peter Parker teaches us, so I healed them all. I still didn’t understand it, and didn’t know how I was doing it, but I gradually learned how to do it faster and less disorientingly, and 39 hours and six liters of coffee later I had healed every birth defect, amputation, tumor, rheumatoid knee and vision impairment. Aircraft pilots might be blinded by the brilliance of the sun glinting off the hundreds of shiny, acne-free teen faces turned proudly toward the azure sky. Visitors in later years would be subliminally creeped out by the smooth, liquid silence of a town where no one was coughing, sneezing, or projectile vomiting. Everything had changed in Kestlerville, because of my bizarre accident and newfound gifts.

In the days that followed I hitchhiked a great deal. I was confident that I would be OK even if an evil deviant of a driver wanted to experiment with my orifices then feed me into the workings of the gigantic refurbished industrial meat-grinder that he keeps in the soundproofed barn on his decrepit and out-of-the-way failed mustard farm. I would just lay my hand on his sweaty and twitching forehead, and heal the sickness of the mind that led him to do such amazingly rude and messy things.

I hitchhiked down to Cincinnati where I healed two old men with weak hearts who were about to drop dead at the same time on their chessboard in the park, one bicycle messenger who was crushed under a bus with a cruelly ironic ad on the side for the local NBC station’s “High-Impact, Hard-Hitting News,” and seventeen leprous nuns who had not ventured out of their downtown convent into the light of day since 1972. I then hitchhiked west as far as St. Louis, where I quashed an outbreak of a kickass Asian flu that would have killed hundreds and made thousands of others use way too much antibacterial hand soap.

to be continued…