no dialog contest entry. |
It started as a slushy rain. Then transitioned to a sloppy snow. By midnight the streets had frozen. It was not good news. They had counted on the weather being fair through the due date, but nature was not cooperating. That left them hoping that the child would be late. In a preview of the rest of the child's life, he was ahead of time managing to thoroughly inconvenience both of his parents on the way. His name was Romeo. He was born at ten-fifteen in the morning, during the biggest winter storm of the century. He should have been called Tornado because that was what his arrival was like for his parents. He was magically precocious, in the Harry Potter sense. This was difficult for them because magic had long since died in their universe. Magic simply wasn't done anymore except in the Penn and Teller kind of way. At ten, Romeo turned the cat into a frog and the dog into a rat right before his father's eyes. That was the reason they left him on the church steps. The nuns ended up begging the priest to exorcise him. By eighteen Romeo was heavily medicated in an effort to keep his powers in check. At twenty-one, he went off his meds. As a result, the gravity in half of the city was turned sideways. People fell out of the city. His temper tantrum was epic. He changed pavement to putty, and cars to taffy. It took half of the police department to bring him down. Romeo was handcuffed and tasered into an unconscious lump of energy. They had to wait for an ambulance to transport him. The paramedics arrived and strapped Romeo to the stretcher. They put the stretcher in the ambulance. On closing the door Romeo disappeared, ambulance and all. Another violent blizzard whipped itself up in mid-July celebrating his exit from the world in the same way he had entered. 323 words. |