The News

Once upon a time, there was a little girl. She lived in a yellow house in the suburbs with her mother and father. One Sunday morning was just like any other until something unusual happened. 

The little girl was sitting at the kitchen table picking at her cheese omelette with her fork. Her mother had gone into the living room to answer the ringing telephone. Her father sat quietly behind a newspaper, more than likely reading about the strategies the newly appointed coach of his favorite football team was going to attempt in the upcoming season.

The little girl leaned her cheek in her hand and, swinging her feet which barely reached the ground, looked quietly at the front page of the paper. There was a picture of an older man with an unfriendly scowl on his face. She tried to read the headline, but it was covered by the tip of the paper which was hanging lazily over itself. 

Then, suddenly, something surprised her causing her to stop kicking her feet. The man in the picture blinked at her and was then seeming to squint his eyes menacingly at her. She held herself completely still as her father brought the page tips together and then back apart, turning the page and grunting disapprovingly. When the picture of the older man on the front page came back into view, he was smiling. It was not a friendly smile like the one her teacher or her uncle had. It wasn't even a happy smile. It seemed angry and the picture of the man suddenly opened his mouth wide as if to bite into an overly large hamburger.

The little girl screamed and dropped her fork, jumping out of her chair making it scrape on the tile. At that precise moment that the man in the picture had moved, her father let out a roar of pain. The newspaper had jumped towards him, causing him and his chair to fall with a loud clunk. Underneath the paper, the little girl could not see what was happening, but her father was now on the floor struggling with the newspaper. Red blood began to smear on the clean white tile below him.

The little girl's mother walked swiftly into the kitchen at that time, asking if everything was alright, but she stopped in mid-sentence to scream and raise her hands to her cheeks. When her mother screamed, this caused the little girl to squeal again in horror. It was then that the mother leapt forward and bravely pulled the newspaper from her husband. His body twitched beneath her and his face was unrecognizable. 

Another scream was heard as the newspaper had then began attacking the mother's bosom. The little girl ran forward and tried to tear the newspaper out of her screaming mother's arms, but the newspaper was as strong as the flannel of her yellow pajamas. By this time, there were knocks on the door and people peering through the windows. A man's muffled voice from outside said something about the police in a rushed tone and a window was broken open.

The girl sat on the kitchen floor with her hands over her face, squealing in fear. She watched the bloody scene from between her fingers. People came into her home from the windows and the front and back doors. She watched in terror as they, too, were attacked by the black and white menace. Men in dark blue uniforms came, too, but were also attacked and remained twitching on the floors throughout the little girl's home.

Hours later, all was finally quiet and the little girl sat, curled, under the kitchen table where she could see the blood smeared below her father's arm and her mother looking at her with fear and worry frozen in her eyes. Her stomach growled. She had not eaten much of her omelette that morning and it must have been past noon as the sunshine had left the eastern windows and the kitchen was slowly falling under a calm blue darkness of the reflected robin's-egg-blue walls.

The little girl cautiously put her hand on her chair and pulled herself shakily from under the table. She hugged herself and walked quietly through the house, being careful where she placed her tiny, bare feet. She was looking silently at all of the bodies spread throughout her home, but she was not sure what she had been looking for until it found her. 

She heard a sudden rustling of paper and she felt a sharp pain on her right ankle. She screamed as only a little girl could and fell to the floor, grabbing onto a man's robe to try to pull herself away, but the sharp stabs were moving up her leg, through her yellow, and now red, pajama pants like hundreds of terrible paper cuts. 

She felt her stomach growl again and give a terrible lurch. Everything in the room in front of her moved suddenly to the right and she felt something soft hit her left ear. She could no longer hear the rustling paper, and a muffled ringing drowned out her weakened screams. She began to lose sight of the red robed man in front of her eyes as if she had rubbed them too hard, or had stared into the sunlight too long. She felt sick and she shut her eyes and then knew nothing.

The End.