Bum Magic: A Tale of Sludge and Slime

I went over to the body and crouched to inspect it more closely. A symbol was branded on her right shoulder blade – a circle with hundreds of lines intersecting through it to create a web, and tiny numbers scattered over each line. The outside of the circle had seemingly-random Greek letters evenly spaced across its perimeter.

Everyone else stood behind me and looked at the symbol, equally confused.

“Anita? Caleb? Do one of you have a phone? Take a picture of this and let’s get the hell out of here.

Anita snapped a picture, and then we did in fact get the hell out of there.

When we made it back to the side of the road, my mark started to glow red and pulsate. The pulses were so strong I was worried the mark was going to jump right out of my skin. Shortly after, Mickey’s began to do the same.

“I guess they liked that ass-kicking we delivered to the Iron Granny,” I said.

Three new blisters bubbled up just above my right pectoral muscle. I took the flashlight from Caleb and illuminated them. There were three new symbols contained in the blisters: an eyeball, a red cross, and something that looked like a bottle of Elmer’s glue. I scrunched my face up trying to figure out what they meant. The red cross was easy: that was obviously some sort of healing power — no way I’d go with something that boring. The other two were more confusing. I could think of a hundred eye-related powers, but none of them incorporated slime. My eyes were fixated on the Elmer’s Glue bottle the most. If it was what I thought it was, then it would be an amazing choice. If it wasn’t, then I was possibly wasting a level.

Please be sticky slime.

I poked the glue blister with my chin, and it deflated. The other two quickly followed. Black blobs moved under my skin and surfaced on the top-right quadrant of my chest. For the first time, it dawned on me that, if this mark progresses across my entire body, I’m going to look like I’m covered head-to-toe in cheetah print — great.

Surprisingly, the progression didn’t hurt at all this time around. It didn’t even itch. It was more of a tickle, like someone was gently running their fingers across my chest. Even more surprisingly, my arms were completely healed once the progression was done.

I felt like a new man. My arms had never felt better. Everything felt amazing, actually. I felt like I had eaten a can of Popeye’s spinach and washed it down with a gram of cocaine. Energy coursed through my body, and my muscles arms and legs felt like fucking tree trunks. It was exhilarating. I slammed my fist on the road and left a hand-sized dent in the asphalt.

Holy shit.

“Holy shit,” Anita said. But she wasn’t looking at me. She was looking at Mickey.

He was running down the street faster than any human should be capable of. Sprinting back towards us, he looked more like a car coming than a man. He came to an abrupt halt in front of me, and I was surprised to not hear tires screeching behind him.

“Look at this shit, Gus,” he said, and he extended his right arm. Something started to push up from inside of his hand through the skin on his palm. It broke through, and a rod extended into his hand. It was an off white color, like it was made of bone, and it hummed, vibrating so rapidly that it was hard to even notice it.

“If I smack someone with this, I’m pretty sure they’ll fuckin explode,” Mickey said. He looked like he wanted to try it out, and there were only the three of us here. I stood on guard for a second, but he slid the bone back into his stigmata, and it closed up like it was never there.

A different feeling emerged in my hands. Not the usual pressured itching. My hands felt about ten pounds heavier, and they were sticky — when I touched my middle finger and thumb together, I had to pull them apart with my other hand.

I clenched my fist, pointed it at the ground, and black sludge secreted from my knuckles and oozed onto the dirt.