And Then I Woke Up

As a boy, I believed that the most unfortunate gladiators were chosen to battle with beasts, and that the most fortunate were chosen to battle other gladiators. To face off against another human is a fair fight. Unlike the bear, he does not have claws that could rip off your whole face with one swing. Unlike the hyena, he does not have jaws that could snap your spine in one bite. He has a weapon, but so do you, and so none of you have an advantage. You are equals.

A beast operates on instinct. He will not hear your cries for mercy. He will simply slay you.

Man operates on reason. He will hear your cries for mercy. Even if he must slay you, empathy compels him to give you a swift, painless death.

Or so I believed.

Because the truth is that although man claims to operate on reason, he is just as much a slave of instinct as any other predator. As the crowd cries out for blood, their voices rising in a roar more mighty than even the fiercest lion, I now know that man is the most brutal beast of all.

I sit in a pool of my own sweat, collecting between my bottom and the smooth surface of one of those scooters from gym class, my right hand on the handle, and my left hand holding a spear fashioned from a fork, a knife, and a spoon. Hundreds of other pieces of plastic cutlery litter the multicolored lines on the floor, along with the scratched, sliced, and scooped out remains of the fallen. They have been mangled beyond recognition, friend and foe all blurring together. Several of their scooters are strewn across the wooden wasteland, now seeming as lifeless as their former riders.

How did I get here?

The Romans would give the gladiators weapons, but the Instructor wanted to make this more entertaining. We had to make our own. They set out a fork, a spoon, and a knife in the middle line for each of us. Fifty of us would start on the left side of the line. Fifty of us would start on the right side of the line. They told us that the left had to “poke” everyone on the right, or the right had to “poke” everyone on the left. Only then will we be able to go home. With that, the instructor blew the whistle, and then all one hundred of us were off.

Of course, they conveniently left out the teeny tiny trivial not at all important detail that when you get “poked” by these pieces of cutlery, you actually get killed.

Now, in the midst of the cutlery-covered carnage, I count seven of us who were still scooting. Six on the right and two on the left. One of the two people left on the left is me.

“We’re outmatched,” Jack, short for Jackowalski, says hoarsely as he rolls up to me on his own scooter, a brilliant blue, now blotted with the blood of the man he impaled on his fork trident.

“Not outmatched, outnumbered,” I snarl out as I detach my spoon from my cutlery contraption, sticking it in my mouth and inhaling the synthetic scent like smoke from a cigarette. I motion towards our five opponents and channel my inner Skipper from the Penguins of Madagascar. “Jackowalski, analysis.”

My glare rests on a cyclops whose body seems to be composed of circular clouds of cyan cotton-candy.

“That blubbering one in the middle is Boboroo.” Jack pushes up his glasses and they flash like a camera, which is fitting because we seem to be in a very screwed-up anime. “One knife and one spoon. I think she uses the spoon as a shield –”

“And the knife as a sword?” I cut in. Respectfully

“Actually, she uses both the knife and the spoon as shields, you dingus,” Jack corrects me. Disrespectfully.

“What a weirdo,” I snort.

I follow Jack’s finger as he points to the zebra with a mohawk that is yelling very disrespectfully at the cyclops in Mandarin for some reason.

“The guy beside Boboroo is Zooluce, the two-forked. He’s the offense to Boboroo’s defense. They work well as a pair, but if we can split them up, we can take them down separately.”

My upper lip curls up into a sneer.

“I call dibs on Zooluce.” I hate zebras because of their stupid stripes. At least okapis and tigers have brown and orange fur to balance it out. Zebras are too monochromatic. Jack has learned not to waste his breath on trying to get me to abandon my irrational disgust with zebras. He just keeps on analyzing.

“Whatever floats your boat,” he sighs, shrugging and motioning towards an onion with nice legs and even nicer high heels.

“Next up, we have Figspitz. She uses one spoon as a shield and the other spoon as a sword.”

I do not know why she is an onion and yet she is called Figspitz. But who am I to judge the naming conventions of the onion people? I’ll judge zebras as much as I please, though.

Figspitz skates across the gym floor and executes a perfect triple axel, which shouldn’t be possible. Then again, there is no physics in the school of the damned. Not that I mind. The only thing I hate more than zebras is physics. Zebras just make me mad, but I have a personal grudge against physics. You see, physics took my last brain cell.

“Uh-oh, looks like she’s actually skilled.” I sharpen my fork with my knife. “We’ll need to take her down together.”

“Now Chewbrain, over there, he’s intertwined a bunch of forks to form a net. Once he ensnares his opponent, he stabs them with the spoon.”

“Ouch.”

Chewbrain looks exactly like me, but with the crazy eyes, cold sweat, and strained, shaky smile that I get after trying to get a grip of accounting. Also, he is bald. I cannot decide which is more disturbing.

“If you think he’s crazy, you should see Beaniefish. He’s been collecting all the forks and knives from the bodies of his fallen friends and now he uses them like throwing stars.”

I look at Beaniefish, who is, appropriately, a beanie that is wearing a fish. Honestly, he doesn’t seem that scary. Only very, very, very, very sad. And very, very, very, very small.

“And if you think Beaniefish is crazy, wait until you meet Hippyhill.” Jack shudders, tracing the jagged scar on the front of his epaulet. “She’s had the same two knives for the whole game. She uses one to take out the wheels of her opponents’ scooters, and then she slices their head clean off.”

Hippyhill, contrary to what you would assume, is not a hippo, but a neon green rhinoceros with butterfly wings. She’s huge. Not that it’s a bad thing to be huge. I’ll body-shame a zebra any day. I’ll even body-shame an okapi, but I draw the line at body-shaming rhinos. And tigers. Tigers are so cool, man.

“I’m sorry, she slices their head off?” I splutter, waving my newly sharpened fork in her direction as I whip around to look at Jack. “Aren’t we supposed to be in elementary school?”

“Elementary school?” Jack shakes his head, laughing wildly, and then brokenly – Is brokenly even a word? Probably not. He waves toward the corpse-and-cutlery-strewn battlefield. “This...this is the school of the damned.”

A fork flies towards me. Jack dodges, and I duck, and not a second too soon. It shaves off the hair on the right side of my head.

Beaniefish flips through his arsenal. Another fork tears through the air. I duck to the other side. I now have a mohawk.

“You see, you and I are not so different,” Zooluce sneers at me.

“Only I would not say one of the lamest villain lines in the history of villain lines.” I shuffle away from Zooluce as he stabs at me with his dual forks. I don’t know how he’s holding them. He must be doing so telepathically. Or telekinetically. One of the two.

“First of all, if the parallel between the protagonist and the antagonist is well-written enough, then you don’t need the line.” I trap one of the forks between my knife and spoon, twisting it out of his hold so it clatters to the colored lines on the wooden floor. “Second of all, if the parallel between the protagonist and the antagonist is so subtle that you have to say the line, then you need to rewrite the protagonist and antagonist!”

Boboroo slams into me with her spoon shield. Somehow, it breaks my nose and blood sprays all over my white shirt. It’s very aesthetically appealing. I roll back and forth. Zooluce and Boboroo trap me between them, slashing at me with his fork and her spoon, respectively. I would say they’re a power couple, but Boboroo deserves so much better. She should ditch him and become a hairdresser, methinks, seeing as she’s trimming my mohawk perfectly.

I hook onto Zooluce’s leg with my foot, dragging him down with me. I drive my spear into his cold, black-and-white heart. He whinnies in agony, and like in most bad action movies, dies instantly, rather than slowly having the life drained out of him like I wanted. Boboroo shrieks and slumps to her knees, cradling him to her chest, tears trickling from her one eye.

“Noooooo!” she screams, another cliche line that makes the bottom of my belly boil, double, bubble, toil, and trouble with righteous rage. She leaps up and cuts deep into my cheekbone with her knife. I spin away from her, smack her in the stomach with the length of my spear, and stick the spearhead into her pupil. Boom. Also dead. I do not mind granting her a quick demise, seeing as she is not a zebra.

Jack’s face swells with bruises. From the shallow, strained way he’s breathing, he must have a few broken ribs. Figspitz smirks and spins her spoons. Chewbrain and Hippyhill close in on him from behind. Cornered, and left with no choice, Jack unleashes his special technique. He armpit farts, and the force propels him upward.

“Jackowalsi, analysis!” he cries before summoning a stampede of scooters, which flattens Figspitz. With her dying breath, she saturates the atmosphere with sulfur. Chewbrain and Hippyhill start sobbing incoherently, not because Figspitz is dead, but because she smells so freaking bad. The scooters surround Jack, shielding him from the blast.

I reconstruct my spear into a gas mask and go into the stifling sulfur fog. The silhouettes of Chewbrain and Hippyhill swim around me. A shadow spreads into the corner of my vision, and then the net tightens around me. With a flutter of her butterfly wings, Hippyhill takes off and engages Jack in aerial combat.

“Jackowalski, analysis!” I gasp out before the net of forks ensnares my throat, sealing my windpipe shut.

“Chewbrain says the live-action remake of Mulan is better than the original!” Jack yells back. He wrestles Hippyhill into a headlock. Her horn grows neon green. Lasers shoot out of it. Jack tumbles out of the sky. Well, not the sky, because we’re in a building. Jack tumbles out of whatever you call the space that’s one inch lower from the ceiling, but his last words before he’s swallowed up by the sulfur storm are enough to strengthen me.

“The…” A fork shatters. “Live-action…” Another fork explodes into smithereens. “Mulan…” The forks constricting around my neck crack apart, and I shout and spit with all of my might. “Is an utter insult to the masterpiece that is Mulan 1998!”

Chewbrain is studded with the plastic shrapnel, his own net turned against him. Beaniefish throws one last fork. Then several shards of the substance bury themselves in his vital organs.

Scarlet seeps out from the four tiny holes in my stomach, blending with the crimson color of my wheeled square.

They poked me.

“Steve? Oh god, Steve!” Jack slumps to his knees, cradling me to his chest. Wow, my life is actually slowly draining out of me, and I haven’t died instantly. The screenwriters have learned their lesson. Points for accuracy.

We have won. I would ask at what cost, but that’s cliche.

“It’s over, Steve, we’re going home,” Jack starts sobbing incoherently, not only because I smell so freaking bad, but because I’m dying. “Just hang in there. Hang in there!”

The scooters surround us.

"I killed 5 people, Jack,” I cough, passing my plastic spoon to him. He cradles it in his hands, its frail, pale body like a miniature corpse in his palms. His brow furrows, first in confusion at my action, then in agonized comprehension as it settles in. I have left him this, so even if my soul leaves my body, it will not leave him. It will be all he has left of me. A single tear trickles down his cheek, then the whiteness washes over me.

"Good job,” he whispers.

And then I go home.