Tritium Tribulations

(beginning of a story I wrote last June; like most others, it goes absolutely nowhere, but you gotta keep feeding the dragon...)

Ethan and Dwayne's Tritium Tribulations

Ethan and Dwayne were trundling along the path that led to the merry-go-round, trying to get to the park before the last of the tritium in their blood ceased flowing, causing a paucity of ionic flux which usually made them collapse in a fit of epileptic writhing; a disturbing sight to be sure. Their tritium was injected every morning, by a local apothecary named Thompson, a dwarfish crow of a man who fixed up all the locals with the more cutting edge herbs and spices. The problem this particular morning was that the local bus line was on strike—collective bargaining over job security and dismissal protocol, or some issue like that—and so they were walking instead of riding to the carnival park, where Thompson the crow had his lab and kept his supplies of tritium and even (some said) balderine, a more potent concoction than the former.

Ethan Ghentz didn’t like being dependent on tritium, any more than a cobra likes being eaten by a komodo dragon, but he took the injections ever since he was a kid. One day the bullies in the schoolyard thrashed him within an inch, and he lost so much blood that tritium was the only way to save him. It was either the tritium or the cemetery, his mom would joke later on, whenever Ethan grimaced as the syringe was filling his veins with the harmful, lifesaving drug. Ethan didn’t laugh at his mom’s jokes, because they weren’t very funny.

Dwayne Burrows was a tagalong, a bit of a pukemonger actually, always searching for the ugly things about others that he could note and later spin to his advantage...

(and then I looked up from the keyboard, made a face at the screen, and moved on)