Milo's eyes glew bright white as the small bulb in the current tap flickered on and off with a loud Pop! The toddler found himself jettisoned across the living room, smashing through the glass coffee table and knocking over his mother's priceless antique china cabinet. His tiny fingers were blackened and cauterized from the intense electric heat. He wet himself.
The glass in the middle of the room had formed a sort of halo in the center of the living room, amidst the remains of the coffee table, which reflected the tiny plastic halo of the angel atop the Christmas Tree. Thankfully, the presents around the tree remained safe from the boy's voyage to the other side of the room.
Besides the Pop! from the current tap's violent reaction to a tin ornament hook being lodged inside of it, and besides the decimation of the glass coffee table, the house remained still. Milo's mother and father, exhausted from too much wine and too long Christmas parties, were still slumbering in their beds.
The current tap looked in poor shape. It's once vibrant light seemed to flicker on and off, with the tin ornament hook on the floor in front of it, playing the part of the smoking gun. It wallowed in it's death throes, the copper coils inside of it now burnt out. It was a pitiful dying wreck, grasping at the last small straws of existence.
Milo, on the other hand, heaved in breaths of air on the far wall, struggling for life as the current tap seemed resigned to it's fate. His face seemed warped with pain, and he was unable to cry out to his parents for assistance. In his mind, alongside a whirlwind of thoughts, one seemed to stand out among the rest: Where was Santa?
So, besides my damnation to hell for writing this, I found inspiration from the current tap's function. Since when it's plugged in it has an electrical current, and things are supposed to go into the plug-ins of the device, I thought about stories of kids who have been electrocuted by such things. I wanted to shift the focus away from the kid, though. I wanted the narrator to seem dispassionate about Milo's state, which is why I eulogized the broken current tap so much.
ReplyDeleteAn interesting tactic, regarding the objectivity of the narrator. I think, though, that the language shows this voice to be anything but objective. The description of Milo's parents, for example, suggests a kind of pathetic world, inclining us to be sympathetic to the poor, ignored child, on Christmas no less. The goal of transformation is here, and the child's curiosity might be explored in a revision.
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