Today in 9th grade English class while the kids were working on their poetry, the teacher asked a few of them, what they would do if a horde of five-year-olds were coming at them? Could they defend themselves? I asked him if the District was threatening him with a kindergarten class and he laughed. But my mind started working and this is what I came up with. I’ve polished it up a bit, but about half of it was written in ten minutes.

I got a kick out of it. I hope you do too. 😊

I don’t know where they came from, and at that moment I didn’t care. All I knew was a horde of short people covered in what looked strangely like blood, but in retrospect was probably strawberry jam, were coming at me like a pack of hungry snarling wolverines. Fearing for my life, I frantically searched for an escape. My stomach dropped and I began vehemently cursing the Fates for bringing me to one of the few rooms in the school where there was only one door and the windows were sealed shut.

I was trapped.

I turned to face the horde of stick smelly five-year-olds, praying my death would be quick and relatively painless. The feverish glitter in their eyes did not give me hope.

“Climb!” someone screamed.

What?

Climb?

Where?

It was then I saw her. Huddled in the far corner of the room on top of a filing cabinet was a young woman whose clothes were ripped and hair in sticky disarray. It was apparent they had gotten to her first and were back for more. I was just the unlucky sap that found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Life was like that sometimes. Throwing you into the middle of a hurricane just to see if you would survive. My first thought as I leaped for the filing cabinet that this would not be one of those times.

Just as I was about to climb to safety, something grabbed my pant leg and pulled. Yelling in surprise as the woman screamed and grabbed a hold of me, I frantically tried to get free. It was no use. They were just too strong.

“Take of your pants!” she yelled.

“What? Are you crazy?”

“I can’t hold on much longer,” she gritted as I slid a few more millimeters into the mass. “It’s either you or the pants, and you do not want to know what they did to the other one.”

Pants it was.

“What the hell happened?” I yelled as I scrambled on top of the filing cabinet next to her, finally free.

“It was a birthday party,” she gasped. “One of the mothers brought jam filled donuts to celebrate. They attacked her at the door. After that…,” her voice trailed off as her eyes grew haunted and her face even pale, the horror of a room full of five-year-olds on a massive sugar high obviously rendering her catatonic. God only knew what was left of the poor woman who innocently brought the means of our destruction.

Looking down at the crawling, wriggling, sticky mass that was once happily calm children bent on tearing me apart I realized one thing.

We were doomed.

Copyright © 2017 Heidi Barnes