A stream of light shot out from the region of his stomach. What is this, he wondered, watching it burn a hole in the opposite wall, flowered foil wallpaper curling and charring around a growing, glowing ashen circle in the once blank wall. "This must be some sort of strange new superpower" he said to himself, or maybe to the hole in the wall, now smoking like a butted-out cigarette. It must have happened, he reasoned, when he was out fishing, and the lighting had hit from a clear blue sky and ran down the length of his fishing rod, fusing his hands to the plastic grip.
He had peeled away the burnt plastic melded with skin, bandaged his hands and netted the many dead fish that lay floating around his boat. He thought nothing more about it until this moment. Now he had a laser belly, and he wondered what other strange attributes he had picked up. Those stag antlers growing out of his head were a new development, for sure. He ran his fingers over the points. "A good rack," he thought. It would look good on someone's trophy wall.
At that moment the window shattered and the picture of his mother on the opposite wall picked up a new hole. He spun round in time to look through the flying chiffon drapes and see a camouflage peak cap drop down in the window of the adjacent building. Hunters. This would be an adversary worth facing. Immediately he grabbed a stool and set it up below his own window (dodging bullets all the time, for the hunter had started quite a fusillade). He jumped up on the stool, and pressed his belly to the open window. A blinding green light shot out from his navel and the building beyond started to melt and crumple as the beam played over its disintegrating surface. Bricks sizzling and popping, concrete blackening and crumbling, steel dripping white hot, the whole building keeled over into the street like a drunken man, taking the unfortunate hunter with it. He hadn't known what hit him.
(c) Jack Ruttan, 1999