The bus creaked, swung like a seesaw, and then suddenly it was gone, lost from the view of the camera.
The fate of the children— I turned off the television and drifted to sleep....
When I woke, it was to the sound of alarms. Charlie was sitting on the windowsill, whiskers twitching as one police car after another raced past our street. I ended up grabbing my coat and running to where the commotion was. None of the children survived. No, that’ s not right. One of them did, only for a few seconds, before a shaky finger— amidst a hold your fire, you damn rookie! command— pulled the trigger twice. The little girl fell.
It was nothing too fanciful. She didn’ t sprout any wings.
For three mornings, the next town found themselves in places other than their beds.
Three months after, crime spiked to an all-time high. Our city was in chaos. Quick-handed, quick-footed. Each and every high place was a refuge to pickpockets, murderers, escaped convicts( jail-breaks here and there), prostitutes, and chronic masturbators. For some reason, people with a taste for night activities were the first to be gifted.
Three years in. Bodies littered the street when the nation’ s crimefighters took to the sky. Cleaning them was easier.
Scientists initially believed that flight was the next step to human evolution. Of course those lab-people would think that way, except there weren’ t any change to the way people talk, dump, sense things. They gained the ability to fly, there were no proper explanations. Physics was out of the question. Nobody paid attention to the Laws of Gravity anymore.
The Holy Church and its constituents called for quarantine. That is, until the Pope was found dead by head injury— he banged his head on the ceiling of his private lavatory.
Anarchy was a short-lived threat. Governments stabilized when politicians started conducting meetings on top of clouds.
Thirteen years... well. Everybody else became birds of the same feather. Everybody else.
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