The desolation was fierce. The landscape was littered. There was a definite finality in the air. It was the aftermath of a war with debris strewn here and there dictated by the whims of chaos. A person as a focal point could look around his surroundings in this mess and his mind would go beyond identifying with the pain and damage of the carnage and go straight to seeing the art that his visual sensors are being bombarded with.
As I scan the scenery, I tally up in my mind the individual stories as I count the heads of the massacred. The first face that I recognize is Alan Gray. I immediately shooed away all of the derisive thoughts that encroached into my mind about him the moment the visual of him registered in my brain. I went up to him wanting to hold him close to my bosom and console him. I shrieked in my head as I saw completely his full condition: there was only half of him there. He had been entirely severed at the midsection and his entrails had gushed out. Those guts were now smeared on the wooden ground, on the polished oak, as a flattened splotch. Alan, I thought. From now on, I would evoke his name in a hushed tone and with much solemnity.
Whew. That was a downer, wasn't it? Well, you're probably wondering who I am. Right? Well, I'm Stacey McGill. I'm thirteen years old. And I belong to this really amazing group of friends. We call ourselves the Babysitters Club. To tell you the truth, I wasn't born here in Stoneybrook, Connecticut. I used to live in a more metropolitan area but migrated here at the age of twelve.
I was famished. I was on my way to Mira n' Mari, a new restaurant that opened up recently. It was feverishly in vogue in the community. Everybody flocked to it. The whole town rose up as a collective throng and let their lust for food guide them. My friend, Kristy's stepfather, has reservations in a certain little quaint nook tucked away in one of the swankier sections of the place. My friend Mallory's dad was planning on bringing back leftovers to his eight clamoring children. A majority of the responsibility for marshalling them into proper behavior mode to receive the meal falls on Mallory since she's the oldest, a duty she would be frantically trying to accomplish with the help of her mom until the very second he arrives home.
I then spotted Erica Blumberg writhing in agony while lying on the ground as she rapidly swings the bottom half of her body back and forth like a fast-moving pendulum. It was the spasmodic final moments of her life. I scamper up to her and peer down on her face and watch her as she expires and her body relaxes into her death pose. The entire midsection of her body had been mashed down and crushed.
As I trotted along, the haze of death was everywhere. The thickness of it pressed itself against my olfactory detectors in a pushy way as needless reminders of what was going on here.
My senses then perked up. Claudia! CLAUDIA! Is that you? I could imagine her now: she was probably lying on the ground, sprawled out, as if she had just gotten decked by Iron Mike Tyson and decided to stay lying on the canvas for a while, bonding with her new location, but with chocolate or some other junk food material smeared all over her face. She's a total junk food addict. Her belly would be full but she would still be clawing to get more of the unhealthy food in her. As I looked in the direction of Claudia, I saw a huge red ellipse-shaped edifice sitting on the ground. It was completely red with no designs of any kind on it, completely opague. The contours of it were fuzzy.
Claudia
, I yearned. She was reaching out to me. I could sense it. She was still alive but I didn't know for how long. I could imagine hearing her calling out to me in a barely audible volume, a scenario that reasonated in my mind. Claudia! I was on the trail. I felt like my mouthpart had clamped down on the bait that's at the end of a fishing line and am now being reeled in as I follow the path of a scent that will take me to her. The road had only three textures: the crunchiness of shells; squishiness; and a hard, smooth surface that provided the plate for the first two. Even though I had caught Mallory, Jessi and Kristy with my peripheral vision as I passed them, my mind dismissed them as part of the scenery and as nothing to bother with as the pulling power from my destination did not tolerate any deviation.
I then heard a low growl and became alarmed. I looked around to see where the perpetrator of all of this has stationed himself, of whom I assumed was the source of where the noise came from, as my legs continued conveying me forward without my awareness. Then I realized that it was from beneath me. Maybe it was some burrowing predator that travels via underground tunneling. But through this hard oak? I doubted it. Then my tactile senses fleshed out the culprit. It turned out to just be my belly. It was what growled. This made me realize how hungry I was, which caused my legs to churn faster. The red ellipse-shaped thing became larger and larger as I came closer and closer to it. My taste-buds were teeming with anticipation.
I remember days before - which seemed like ages ago - when Claudia told me why the restaurant was called Mira n' Mari. She said that this was a restaurant chain where an individual restaurant would just appear out of nowhere. Their presence would be known when someone stumbles upon it and alerts others. The restaurants appeared in different, completely solid, colors: red, yellow, green, blue, brown and orange. They looked to be completely of one color all of the way around . . . but only to the uninitiated. But to the privileged few, they know better. Not everyone knows why it's called Mira n' Mari. They just know that that's the name. Claudia, who is always intrepid when it comes to anything junk food-related, dared to climb to the top of this monstrosity of a structure and her efforts were not for nothing. Her eyes twinkled even then when she proudly regaled me with this tale so I know how much they must have while at the literal summit of her adventure. Emblazoned on the very center of the roof of the restaurant was a giant white "m". But that's not all. It's called Mira n' Mari, not just Mira or just Mari. She said that she heard from her sister Janine that the headquarters for this chain of restaurants is a giant brown bag. This bag was laying on its flatside back, opened on one end, looking like the mouth of a cave. Inside of this cave were many of these individual restaurants piled together. On the flatside front, which was facing the sky, there's written two "m's" on it. There were also other pictures on it that provided the background for the two "m's".
But then there was the question about why it was called Mira n' Mari and Janine simply said that the one who saw the two "m's" first named it after the Schillaber twins. And that particular ant happened to be . . . SQUISH!
A giant human finger then swooped down from the sky and smooshed me to death while my antennas were tingling having almost completed the journey provided by Claudia's pheromone trail. It crushed my thorax and was probably the culprit that did the same to Erica earlier. My mandibles moved from side to side twice as I savored the last moments of my life, then moved no more.
Author's note: The following is narrated by an omniscient narrator whereas the previous was by Stacey McGill.
Got it, thought Cokie Mason. She had tirelessly squished all of the ants that were scurrying towards the piece of red M&M that she had left on the coffee table. She thought that she had killed all of them until she saw that last straggler. She felt self-satisfied as she dumped a blue M&M from her brown M&M bag onto her palm, then tossed it in her mouth.
She periodically leaves an M&M out on the table in order to attract ants to it. She does this whenever she feels frustrated with something and killing them as they travel towards the treat helps relieve it.
At first she thought that it was oh-so unfair that hers was the only household that got ants in snowy-in-the-winter Stoneybrook, Connecticut. She only got them in the summer. But when she discovered that she could use them for stress-relief purposes, she didn't mind so much.
Author's note: I acknowledge FonzFan82 for the suggestion of using Cokie as the culprit in the end.
