[ WP ] A child is born on Leap Day and his/her aging process is stretched by 4 times . ( After 20 years they will have body and mind of a 5 year old )

I was riding on the bus, watching the worn-out wipers streak the rain across the windshield. Nebraska of all places, a place I'd only ever thought of when I listened to the evening news. Yeah, the news, or the occasional paper. Always too slow to add anything to conversation, not that there were many opportunities for **that** in this strange new world. Even the bus, not a soul on except for me and the driver. People had to drive nowadays -- hell, there was n't much of a choice. Most everyone took things too fast. They could n't see how it slipped away. Like a drop of water wiped suddenly from the glass. Life was abrupt, sudden, and then you were dead. A hole in the ground. Food for maggots. For some at least. I close my eyes and gently crack my neck, a habit I'd only noticed after I stopped smoking all those years ago. Was n't much of a choice in that either, convenience demanded it, and price skyrocketed sometime in the 80's. What I would n't give for one now just to warm my hands. My mind wandered back to death, as it so often did these days. 
 
 How many funerals had I been to? My father of course, in the war. Mother, by some thugs who liked her pretty face. Uncles and aunts across the pond sometime after them. I did n't attend my own funeral at a mere thirty years old. My childhood had been like everyone elses, only after twenty or so did I realize something was wrong. The first doctor I ever seen had raised his suspicions to me, it was in the early fifties with my first husband. I did what I did for good reasons. It was the height of the second Red Scare, and I knew if the doctors figured me out, if my husband started to question why his body aged while mine did not, I knew that I'd be just one more government lab experiment. 
 
 I do n't have those excuses now, except the same rehashed argument in my mind. Once they figure it out, find me, they'll use or destroy me. That simple. Cut and dry. 
 
 The bus slowly came to a stop an hour or so later, my mind wandering ceaselessly all the while. I put an extra two hundred dollars in the change basket when my stop came, hid my face from the speechless driver for obvious reasons, and watched my great granddaughter's bus pull away from the curb and head down the flooded street. I had the irrational urge to put out my thumb in the rain, knowing already that no one would stop. It was fine. I pulled up my hood and walked away from the lone streetlamp, in an empty town; Noam Nebraska. 
 
 THE END
