KILLING FOR THE PARTY:By C.D. Carter
Tuesday, October 25th, 2011They chopped us in half, ripped us apart, poisoned us and buried us alive.
I’ve been spared, so far, in my hiding place on the outskirts of the carnage.
I am their queen, their leader, andI was forced to stand idle while my sisters and brothers were slaughtered enmasse. Their killers – the perpetrators who would never be tried, never be convicted– couldn’t hear their pleading screams of mercy while death swept over themlike so many nothings.
Now I stand here, unseen, and I lookat the one-time home of the innocents who were taken by the merciless monsters who sweat and grunted with effort as they extinguished the lives of the screaming murdered that had grown up together and stood side by side.
They even made mass graves. Dead siblings piled on top of each other in some heinous reminder of what was, and what shall be again.
As it was last year, the murderers spoke of a gathering of some kind, and they hauled the orange upright ovals into our land. The bright oval-things, greeting us with toothless smiles, were hideous, and one of their reviled kind crushed two of my brothers who minded their own, simply existing because they were born.
The poisoning, as it was last year,was the most brutal, the hardest to observe. The innocents wailed for reprieve, unsure of what they had done to deserve such an agonizing, drawn out death. They had never done anything to offend – much less hurt – anyone.
The echoes of their screams ring in my head – I can hear them always, as the poison burned them alive from their insides and their outsides. Their sliced-in-half siblings, lying lifeless nearby, had had it so much easier.
The whirring machine had come, likeit had the year before, and sliced them in half, then in half again, and then once again, with robotic coldness that repulsed me, but also made me happy.They were dead instantaneously; no screaming or pleading. Just dead.
The man came out first, with theblack shields across his eyes and holding the machine in both hands. Its cleavers spun faster than I can describe, so when they touched my colony, they killed immediately. Body parts littered my kingdom.
Then the woman, smiling like themaniac that she is, was among my brethren with a container of the murdering poison. She pulled her trigger and mists of the killing liquid rained down on those who remained after the man had chopped the others to jagged pieces oftheir former selves.
I was spared, as I was last year,because I sat behind the purring box. I’m not quite tall enough to see the top of the square thing that comes alive every so often, so I can only hope and pray that the killers don’t see me here, occasionally swaying in the breeze that blows across my kingdom.
I promised my sisters and brothers –as their shrill screams of mechanical and chemical death reverberated across the kingdom – that I would avenge them. They would not be forgotten, I yelled out as their lives were extinguished.
***
The pumpkins were set on their haystacks, the weeds were gone and the mulch was down. Darrell, for the first time, believed him and Tonya would be ready for their Halloween party.
The weeds had overtaken the yard once again. That’s what they got for leaving the yard to its natural device safter last year’s Monster Bash, as they called it on their email invite. The stubborn, hideous greenery had sprung up through the thirteen bags of mulch they had laid down the year before. Three hundred and fifty-one days later,their backyard was a colony of weeds.
Darrell had started the de-weedingprocess: chopping the stubborn green suckers down to a nub and sometimes yanking them out by their root. He put them in a pile and stuffed that pile in a trash bag.
Tonya had sprayed the weed killer across the remaining revolting plant life that plagued the backyard four days before their vaunted Halloween party, where costumed friends and family would devour bratwurst and gulp beer.
The rest, all severed nubs of former weeds, were buried under an avalanche of mulch.
Dragging the weed wacker across themulch, surveying the couple’s fine work, Darrell wiped dripping sweat from his forehead and eyebrows. He thought the job was done when he spotted one final holdout.
“You sneaky bastard,” he said to the three-and-a-half-foot weed swaying in the breeze behind the big, square airconditioning unit. “You almost got away.”
Darrell revved the weed wacker and approached the monstrous weed, the queen of weeds.
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©2011 C.D. Carter
