Maypole Madness

(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.