(reprinted from Opening Line online 'zine)
Maypole Madness
A Fairy Tale – The Final
Chapter
They
burned their own flag. Crazy and sick, the children screamed like witnesses at
the Salem Witchcraft Trials.
”We’re done with you,” they shouted on a
gray morning in Appleton. “We’re done with your money and your complacent
ignorance.”
They had guns and knives. Twelve-year-old
Tommy Talbot was their leader. “A sociopath,” was what the doctors said; “A
sicko,” was what all his classmates said, …until… everything came to the brink.
Tommy led the children into their own
homes while their parents were off at work. One by one, they broke into their
daddies’ arsenals, grabbing weapons that the families proudly owned in the name
of “Freedom”.
Tommy had already raided his father’s gun
trunk in the basement. He hacked the padlock off with a metal cutter that hung
above the tool table. How stupid, he thought, to padlock a trunk and then leave
a tool to open it twenty feet away.
He also thought father was stupid to molest
his own son and then leave him alive to even the score. But father always
assumed he was mentally crippled; too damaged to ever harm anyone.
Father didn’t know that Tommy was a
different person when he was away from home. Tommy’s teachers would constantly
warn the old man that the boy was a “ticking time bomb,” but that only made
father laugh. Sometimes when he was touching Tommy, he’d say, “Are you a
ticking time bomb, boy? No, I didn’t think so.”
On this epic morning the timer was set to
go off.
The school Principal and his staff were
frantically on the phone trying to contact parents.
“Where are your children?” they asked.
“How come no one’s at school today?”
It was the great Day of Reckoning. Jesus
said it would come – children rising up against their parents – a new order was
set to begin. Far and wide, across the nation, angry kids would remember what
happened in the town of Appleton. They too would rise up in insane defiance;
nothing of the old regime would be left standing.
Before a shot was fired, they tossed
Molotov cocktails through the windows of their parents’ homes. Tommy taught the
children how to make them as, one by one, the suburban homes burned in Satanic
richness.
“The insurance companies will pay out and
the banks will refinance,” he yelled over the roar of the first burning house.
“But then we’ll torch ‘em again and we’ll keep on doing it ‘til the banks and
insurance companies go broke!” The children roared their approval as they
danced from burning home to burning home in maypole madness.
“They want a toxic environment?” Tommy
screamed. “We’ll give ‘em a toxic environment. Suburbs ablaze across the
nation! They’ll have to kill us all, kill their own children – Johnny and Jimmy
and Suzy and Kay.” He raised his fist in angry defiance. “If they want their
sick little world back, it‘ll be over our dead young bodies.”
At high noon, the children arrived in the
Appleton town square like little minutemen militia. From first grade to eighth
they carried holstered guns on their sides and rifles up to their shoulders.
Tommy had a handheld rocket launcher from
Daddy’s arsenal. “Let the first shot be echoed around the world,” he said and
then fired a rocket through the window of the local bank.
The children shouted hurrahs in
prepubescent mania as the rocket exploded and fire and shrapnel burst out
through the doors and windows of the bank.
People poured out onto the street
screaming “terrorists” until they saw their sons and daughters across the
street with rifles and bayonets pointed toward them.
The roar of sirens could be heard in the
distance and then five police cars screeched in front of the town square and
officers piled out with their bodies squatted low, protected by their car
doors. And then, around the corner came an armored SWAT wagon with a machine
gun turret on top.
The Mayor appeared on the sidewalk with a
megaphone.
“What is it that you want?”
“We want nothing!” Tommy screamed. “You
have nothing to give us but this fucked up world filled with war and
exploitation and lies. Children lay in poverty across the globe, while your
filthy-rich, swine leaders speak treatises on how everything must be this way
on the road to prosperity.
“They say, ‘we’ll share our wealth with
you as soon as you give us just a little bit more and work just a little bit
harder.’ Like greedy, dope-pushing junkies, they promise us the world just as
soon as we give ‘em the shirts off our backs.
“And we’re done with economic collapse
and global debt and shithole schools and A-rab
scapegoats. The war on terror is a war on us! And the Mexicans; let’s blame it
all on the Mexican – poor migrants who just want a plate of food for their
children.”
The town’s Presbyterian minister grabbed
the megaphone and appealed to Tommy. “Tommy, it’s me, Reverend Arnold. You can
talk to me.”
But Tommy had tried to talk to him to no
avail. Tommy had visited him several times.
“Daddy touches me,” he would say.
The minister had told Tommy to buck up.
“You’ll never get anywhere with talk like
that.”
Parents lined the sidewalks behind the principal
calling out to their children across the street, “Please, please, stop this
madness. Come home. You’re too young to understand.”
The children picked rocks up off the
ground and started throwing them at their moms and dads. A police captain
grabbed the principal’s megaphone and yelled, “You kids need to disperse now or
we will begin firing.”
The parents screamed, “No! No! It’s our
children! Johnny and Jimmy and Suzy and Kay.”
At Tommy’s mark, the children pulled the
rifles off their shoulders and aimed them at the police cars. The police
captain with the megaphone shouted, “This is your last warning.” An officer in
an armored vest appeared from the roof of the SWAT wagon, placing himself
behind the shield of the machine gun turret.
Tommy yelled, “Fire!” and the young
militia let go their first shots at the police.
The megaphone man, yelled, “Fire!” and
the policeman in the turret and the other officers hidden behind their open car
doors began shooting.
The policemen shot and then they shot some
more and then they shot some more while the parents on the sidewalk screamed.
After a minute and a half of firing, a hundred children lay dead in a pile in
the town square.
Never before in the nation had their been
a slaughter like this. At the memorial, blood tears were cried. Tommy Talbot
was held the culprit.
“Nobody, and I mean nobody – none of the
children – would ever – could ever – think up such horrific thing on their
own”, said the Reverend Arnold who presided at the event in the still
bloodstained town square. Tommy’s father stepped up to the pulpit and
apologized to the town for having a sick and rotten child.
As the proceeding was going on, militias
of children were arming themselves across the nation. Soon they would be out on
the streets ready to die for Tommy Talbot’s cause. If moms and dads throughout
the country wanted a sick, unjust world, that sick world would die with their
children. There would be no new generation to carry it on.
