I AM -- round VII: [WE ARE] THE CHILDREN

by Joseph Martin Kronheim

7.  There are only so many old women to go around--and precisely one less, now that Hansel and Gretel took out that crazy old witch and ate all her candy (rotten little brats!).  Our old woman gave up--a total wash.  And she lost, too, boy!  Big time!  I can't say I pity her all that much--or even at all; nightly spankings and chronically empty tummies sort of rob the soul of charity.  Anyway, so many of us there were and what with things so tight and all, well, you can guess what happened next, starving as we were, weak a pathetic as she was.  Of course, it wasn't long before we had to find the next old lady, and who more likely than one with the means to eat not only various insects and pests (which we'd been doing for years, 'til, of course, we'd cleaned 'em all out (only so much room in that daggone shoe!)), but also cats and dogs and a goat.  A goat!  She had a cow left, and a horse, of course, but we got to her before she got them.  But she was bent on ending things on her own terms.  Determined, she was, and put up a good fight, too, but, well, we were many, we were hungry, we were young and quick; and now we are the Children who killed the Old Lady.  Her cow was delicious, by the way, and we're quite looking forward to the horse.  Italian minute-steaks comin' up!  She spoiled, of course; we couldn't afford refrigeration.

6.    I am the Old Lady who swallowed the flea due to an error in transcription.

5.    It is late in the evening of January 3, 1898.  There's an unsuspecting horse over at the end of Piazza Carlo Alberto.  We're in Torino, such a pretty place, really, but where that jerk and intruder, Friedrich freaking Nietzsche, has just aggravated another political upheaval.  In some crazed fit (and in his final twitching throes of death he claimed he was defending the horse, which he absurdly believed was getting whipped at the time -- well, I was there, and there was no horse-whipping!), the man, mustache and all, hurled himself against the horse, arms tight around its neck, all the while screaming, "God is dead! God is dead!  It's left to me to defend this poor, innocent--"  But he was cut short.  Idiot.  I just couldn't take it anymore.  I jumped into the fray, sinking my mandibles deep.  Yes, it was me.  I am the flea that ate that jerk Friedrich Nietzsche's brain.

4:    I am that jerk Friedrich Nietzsche, who killed the Almighty Force with a stroke of his pen. Gott ist tot.

3:    I am the almighty FORCE of a beer-gutted man's fist, crumpling the Gatorade bottle on his obnoxiously over-sized, synophrys-suffering forehead. What a bum!

2:    I am the Gatorade bottle, thrown by D, that kills the English teacher.

1:    I am the English teacher.