When Keziah was a little girl, her grandmother used to read her a story every night before she went to bed. She would read them out of a thick, leather bound story book – the same story book that was sucked into the vortex of heat that began to swirl around Keziah’s bedroom.

The vortex spun faster, pulling out the pages from the book, peeling the spine away from the binding. She could hear faint footsteps creaking up the stairs as she began to clench her hands. The heat was present, the heat was her.

She couldn’t make herself stop, she just felt more and more heat. She could feel the room caving in on her, the heat running up and down her neck and through her fingers, wrapping around her toes, swimming through her ears. She could hear the man telling her to control it, to let it go. He would tell her not to fight it.

Her grandmother finally burst in to the room.

“Keziah!” She could hear her grandmother screaming.

“What is all this baby?”

Keziah tried to stop the cyclone from spinning, but she just kept drawing in more heat. She only wanted to stop the wind from spinning, to see her grandmother. The bookshelf that was nailed to the wall started to buckle and break off, joining the tornado of objects. She couldn’t help it, every time she tried to stop, the heat got warmer, her hand wound clench and her arms would pulsate with heat. Her grandmother kept calling out her name.

“Keziah!”

She envisioned the time she ran off into the swamp after she knocked over the bowl of gumbo, the time when she tripped the boy on the play ground. All of this was her doing, and now she had upgraded. She began to scream, but her exclamations were quickly muffled and dragged into the gusts of wind the soon swallowed them with all of the other objects in the room.

She opened her eyes, and they glowed a bright white, like the part of the sun no one can see. Her t-shirt was dripping with sweat, and she clenched her hands tighter and tighter. Keziah began to lift off of the ground, bobbing up and down in the center of the minature twister. She couldn’t see anything – no wind, no room, no one.

She could hear her grandmother screaming her name, and the screams grew louder. She could feel her grandmother being blocked by the wall that she had created between them, and as she hovered, completely drenched in sweat, she could feel her grandmother breaking through the wind and the flying object, breaking through to see her.

Keziah’s mind went into a frenzy of thoughts and images, of memories she once knew. She could feel the heat getting stronger, and when she realized that the only other person that knew she had these abilities wasn’t her grandmother – she tried to stop the cyclone all together.

She tried to relax every part of her body and for a moment it worked. The cyclone slowed down, she began to reach the ground again, her grandmother passed through the barrier.

But, before her grandmother could utter a word, a force of heat that Keziah had never felt before plunged over her body. Her body tensed, and the vortex returned with twice the force. She could no longer control her body, and as she rose back up into the air, the last thing she could feel was frail hand tugging on the damp cotton of her shirt, and hand that could not withstand the vortex emanating from the young girl and her terrible power.

Matthew Draughter can be reached at [email protected]