Nobody wants them.

     And nobody cares that nobody wants them:  The little angels of Ward 16.

     They sit behind the building, a few of them cower inside.  Some are tangled up inside doctor’s coats, some wear ragged gowns.

     The coats have grimy, broken nametags still pinned to the chests.  Doctor Raymore, Doctor Tanda, Doctor Brownes.

     The dingy, tie-around gowns are torn and tattered, the baby blue hearts laughably out of place.

     None of them asked to be brought here, and none of them truly wish to stay.  But they cannot venture beyond the borders of the abandoned building.  Fear keeps them in, and fear keeps others out.

     The older ones hold the younger ones, wishing they were taught how one is supposed to comfort a baby.  The middle ones, barely able to walk, toddle around picking up pieces of debris to present triumphantly to the older ones.  The oldest looks less than ten years old, still unable to talk.

     But somehow they speak.  Somehow they communicate, silently, by means no normal soul would comprehend.  They know more of the world than anyone in the city can ever imagine, yet they only wish to know their names.

     They were brought there as children, even as infants.  The oddities of the city, even of the world.  A supposed haven for the ‘unique’ - a patronizing term for the children so feared, no one dared love them.

     Spinning tests over and over, useless games and riddles for the young minds to mull, the Doctors never had any intent of making progress.

     So progress made itself.

     They never imagined that these mute children, seemingly dumb and deaf to the world around them, could speak to each-other.  Nobody cared to notice.

     When the four golden children - the very first tenants of Ward 16 - chose to leave, they were laughed at.  

     The first walked out the front door.  Which was easy, because everyone in the lobby suddenly asphyxiated when she entered the room.

     The second was caught when he melted a hole through the window in his room.  He didn’t escape, but he did blow a hole the size of a sedan in the side of the building.

     The third was said to have pulled the night sky, stars and all, into her bedroom and melted away into nothingness.  The two nurses who saw it still can’t speak.

     The fourth is said to have bleached the walls white, fingertips stretching to the ceiling, forcing waves of blinding light out and down the halls.  Some say he never left the ward,  that he is still living numbly on the top floor.  

     The littlest of the children seem to think so, glancing up ever so often at the third window from the left, where the red bricks of the building are stained white.

     Someone might learn something, if they could learn to speak to them.  But nobody learns their language, and no one cares to love.

     Because nobody cares about them: the angels of Ward 16.