Freewrite: children

You may have seen the young ones slipping through drain pipes and down storm water drains. They are strange, dirty, but relatively harmless. They take what food they need, but for the most part leave us alone. Their parents, long gone, left them in the toilet or in a back alley, and somehow they ended up in the Crongworth Sewage Treatment Facility.

It is at the Crongworth Sewage Treatment Facility that I work, as head chemist. Sometimes we get a child slip through the cracks in our filter. When that happens, it is usually too late for complete rehabilitation. Instead, we give the child a slap-up meal of oats, mixed with probiotic treatment fluid, or whatever we have onhand, and send it off into the world. There is little use trying to bathe a wild sewage child; they are foul smelling things, but they seem to enjoy this smell, derive some kind of perverse pleasure in the olfactory inconvenience they give to others.

Children often need parents, and that is why we assign each sewage child its own robot parent. It is a kind of electric crow that searches for nuts and berries and feeds them to the children. Regurgitated nuts and berries is what sewage children eat, for the first few years.

Then they progress to the hard stuff: stale bread stolen from a 1982 Volkswagon, broken down by the side of the highway.

This is a five minute freewrite based on the prompt children.

Don't they look like sewage children? Joun Bauer - The Princess and the Trolls