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Introduction:
All was quiet.
All was quiet - and reasonably so. It was midnight on a routine Monday evening and families lay tired in bed after a long and strenuous day of hard work at the factories. The boxy households were doused in darkness, the towering streetlights long flicked off. Owls hooted softly to each other, yellow eyes gleaming through the darkness. Trees shivered as bitter breezes nipped at their branches, creating eerie rustles and swaying shadows against the dim light of the moon, barely visible through years of heavy pollution. The electricity had turned off at 10 o'clock, the city curfew, and no light could be seen filtering through the raw night air, no couples going on walks in the homogeneous neighborhoods, no kids clanging the basketball through hoops in the city parks. In fact, there were no signs that anyone was awake at all.
At precisely 12:01 on the routine Monday evening, a boy crept out of bed. Laced up his sneakers. Crept down the stairs and slipped through the back door. Pulling his fleece jacket closer to his body, he vaulted over a surprising number of identical wooden fences, and eventually stopped in the 20ft by 20ft square of backyard allotted to number 401, Warwick street. Taking in a sharp breath of the crisp, refreshing air, the boy picked up a smooth rock, weighing it in his hand and tossing it into the air a couple times before finally hurling towards one of the boxy windows on the boxy house.
Far in the distance, sirens squealed.
The window creaked open by an unseen hand, quickly replaced by an annoyed whisper: "God, could you be any louder?"
Nearer in the distance, the sirens shut off.
The boy smiled in relief, all preconceived notions of getting caught washed away by the girl's teasing voice. "I could," he replied back, crossing the sparse lawn in quick strides and placing his hands on the trunk of an oak not far away from the window. "Get louder, I mean." Swinging up the trunk deftly, the boy leapt to the first branch, about three feet off the ground.
"Please don't," the girl's voice answered haughtily, though her smile could be heard through the hissed words. "Tell you what -" the boy started, only to have a hand clamped over his mouth and a muscled forearm around his neck in an uncompromising half nelson. We never got to know what the boy was going to tell the girl, because his muffled pleas for help never reached kind ears. Everyone was too busy obeying curfew, anyhow. Instead, the boy was carted off to the waiting police car, red in the face, choking, and fearing for his life. Offenders of the curfew received harsh punishment - though it was minimal beside the charges of meeting with someone of the opposite gender. The punishment for that, quite frankly, was death.
The car drove away from Warwick street at 12:11 on the routine Monday night with one more passenger than it had come with - a passenger with his life stripped away in a mere ten minutes - and then all was quiet once again.
Let this be a lesson to you all.
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