Warren Adler 2009 Short Story Contest Finalists

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It took some time to piece together what exactly had happened, gone wrong. I'm still not confident that the story we agreed upon is very closely connected to actual events. The kids involved told several thousand different tales, contradicting themselves and circling back often to insist that what they had denied yesterday was true today. Some of my colleagues attribute this wobbling to the nature of children's minds, to the stress these particular poor little kids were under, or to the troubled times in which we live.

Horse-fucking-shit, I say. I say these particular little pissants are cunning liars, sociopathic little demons who ought to be gently helped out of this world for the good of everyone. Few people realize how much of the violence in this world is attributable to kids. I don't mean little peckers picking up guns and winging a playmate, pouring rat poison onto the tea party cookies, nudging little Timmy off the top of the slide---"on accident." I am of the opinion that nothing happens by accident, certainly not in the world of kids. Adults are different, I'll admit. Adults get careless, have a lot on their minds, let their left hands flail around while their right hands are scratching their nuts. But not kids. Kids have very little on their minds and know exactly what they are doing.

That's part of it. The other part is that kids have no moral restraint. What I mean by that is that moral considerations don't enter into the way they think about things. And they do think. Simply but very clearly. Lots of people convince themselves that kids are instinctual, operating like puppies and gophers. Nope. Kids have this terrifying ability to send their locomotives down a single track. That's because kids are stupid, but their stupidity is their strength.

Adults can think in very complex ways, which is their weakness. Adults build up a lot of resistance to seeing what's right there in front of them and waste some of their best thinking time manufacturing ways to avoid what's so fucking obvious. And it is obvious. Jesus Christ! We have to teach ourselves, carefully and over time, to mistake utterly what kids are and what they do.

Freud said that if parents were capable of learning about children from observation and experience there'd be no need for him to write books. But what did Freud know? As usual, he got it only half right. True, adults don't know a thing about kids, but it's not because we are incapable of learning but that we don't want to. Allowing ourselves to see kids for what they are would be like learning that God is a fall-down slobbering drunk, that the moon is made of shit, that the best things in life are expensive.

In that sense, there's nothing exceptional about this particular criminal case. People are always thinking crimes involving kids are exceptional. Those British monster seven-year-olds who tortured a five-year-old and then tied him to the train-track and watched as he was sliced and diced; the kids who burned the fourteen homeless people alive, tied them to stakes and then set fire to them on the beach by the light of the moon; the kids who executed the parents of one of their set by taking an electric meat carver to the folks and hacking off very thin slices over a period of six hours; the little girls who drowned all the boys in the second grade of their exclusive private school by holding them down and forcing garden hoses down their throats, slowly turning them up to full blast; the Columbine goons. Run of the mill. I know you won't believe me. You can't, not because you love kids but because you love your own illusions. It's not a question of being sentimental but of being a coward.

It makes me sick, to tell the truth---not kids so much as people like you.

But to get to the story: it all starts with one of those infuriatingly enlightened kids shows on television the tax-payers are forced to fund. Don't get me wrong. I am not a campaigner against PBS or other pathetic little high culture dribbles our government supports. I may be a cop but I don't mind it when a symphony or a ballet gets some public money. Museums and libraries and lesbian performance art: I am not opposed. Such things would wither and die without a few million being wrenched from unwilling citizens, who would be happy to subsist with such artic experiences as are available in wrestling and the graceful tire-changing at a NASCAR event. Fund the high-brows, I say, not much but some. Me and my fellow flat-foots often get together for Masterpiece Theatre or an episode of NOVA. If you believe that, you'd probably believe that college football players are actual students, that public officials are public servants, and that fucking little monster kids are innocents at heart.

I guess I've made my views on kids, or rather my views on the customary views of kids, sufficiently clear, maybe over-clear. But it is the point of this story, so I'm not fucking going to apologize.

I should apologize, were I the apologizing sort, for tilting a little from the center of my story in discussing the adult programming policies of PBS and how they are funded. Truth is, that it has as much to do with my story as do my opinions on the future of the Pittsburgh Pirates (dim). The thing about PBS is that they devote a ridiculous amount of their limited time and even more limited money not to sensible people but to kids, to children's programming. I haven't seen figures, but I'd guess that half their schedule and at least that much of their budget is beamed straight at the soulless minds of the under-ten set. Why? Who knows? But those are the facts. Everyone knows about Sesame Street; but not everyone knows that, along with such comparatively harmless dribble, there are programs trying to educate the uneducable, appealing to a high-toned curiosity that we'd love to think is there in children. Did you know there are hours of informational and cultural programming aimed at "our youngest viewers"? PBS wants to teach them not simply to count and add but to ingest social values and cultural sensitivity, a respect for diversity. The true agenda is straight-line left wing vomit, of course, a clumsy attempt to manufacture little Democrats who will grow up to tolerate illegal immigrants and White House Aides with loose and willing lips.

The particular program that came under our view was part of a series called "One World, Many Peoples." Imagine having the sort of mind that would find such a title expressive and digestible? Thank God you and I are more sensible. You are, right?

The program in this case aimed at forming the sensibilities and holding the attention of the little ones by giving them a view of our Southern European neighbors that was colorful and happy, spirited and chummy. For a full hour, kids were shown fast-moving little pictures of Spain, all aiming to show how delightful these people were, with their sombreros and their paintings and flamenco dancers and siestas and fucking Roman Catholicism and some mountains and beaches and a history rich with sculptors and writers and generals and explorers. The segments were very short, silly, and didactic, especially short. Still, gauging the attention span of their average audience member at about twenty-five seconds showed serious misjudgment, a wild overestimation of the quality and intensity of concentration these little near-morons were willing to expend.
But, dim as they were, these kids could exercise a demonic kind of focus when something caught hold of their selfish desires. In the case of the hour-long celebration of Spain, it was bull-fighting. The program, of course, offered a sanitized version of bull-fighting, a lot less bloody than the real thing. They also had a talking head letting kids know that, though we mustn't judge other cultures and their pleasures or indulge in what is known, kiddies, as "cultural imperialism" by being censorious, this ancient and, yes, religious ritual edged a little too close to animal cruelty to be the sort of thing an enlightened American child would want to approve of or attend when in Madrid or Tijuana.

That caution had less than no effect on the particular collection of little Jeffrey Dahmers and Lizzie Bordens we had here in this white, up-scale suburb that falls in my jurisdiction. Where the crime occurred. That's right: up-scale and, even more remarkable, heavily REPUBLICAN! WHITE! There's one area of felonious behavior that knows no racial boundaries, and that's the vast realm of kiddie crime. It's certainly shocking that it should be so, and even cops like us have a little trouble recognizing the fact that the usual overwhelming dominance of blacks in the crime area doesn't extend to kids. A little trouble: that's a laugh. We're no better than the average idiot when it comes to sentimentalizing children and white children especially.

Here we have these little rich shits, watching the way the bulls were tortured and tormented, their neck muscles weakened or even severed so that the toreador would have easy pickings for his ritualized murder. They sure paid close attention to that! Swallowed it in, processed it carefully, to the smallest detail.
Had they lived on a farm, they might have tried an actual bull for their fun and the result would likely have been even better than this one: maybe the bull would have cleaned out the whole lot of them. As it was, there in the suburbs, they could find nothing that big or, so they thought, ferocious.

They didn't have the same sort of trouble duplicating or even surpassing other features of the Spanish rite. The costumes were remarkably fine, no cost spared and no thought given to wasting human resources on twenty minutes of play that would have kept alive a moderately-sized African village for months. The mock arena they devised was so elaborate I am still convinced adults had a hand in setting it up. The grandstands and wooden barriers and the flags? Kids wouldn't have had the patience. But the parents here are eager to stay away from this, lying their asses off and disclaiming all responsibility as soon as they discovered death was a feature of this kiddie play.

What we do know is this: unable to locate a bull or cow, llama or brown bear, the kids stole a large neighborhood dog, some kind of Labrador mix, we have discovered. They proceeded, just as in the film, to torture the animal, taunting it verbally and not-so-verbally, finally sticking pointed sticks in the beast and adding little creative touches of their own: needles up the butt, not to mention some thrashing with branches and a wee bit of clubbing with thicker poles, enough to fracture a shoulder and cause what must have been great pain. The dog, probably by nature as gentle and passive (and imbecilic) as Labs generally are, was apparently not in such a good mood after this treatment.

The chosen matador had a really terrific costume; we can at least give her that. We have to take that mostly on trust, though, as there's not a lot of it left. As I opened by saying, it is tough to know exactly what happened when little "Missy" Barnard entered the arena to the trumpet music they had piped in through really first-class amplifying equipment. Here's where the stories become mixed and fluid, colored by the little shits's willingness to tell any sort of lie to save their own hides.

Near as we can tell, Missy came in slowly, approaching the battered beast with an artistic strut borrowed from the PBS special, for sure jabbing at it with a sword-like branch, probably also thrashing it some as well. There are about three hundred possibilities as to what developed in the next seconds, but the upshot is that the dog tore free of its tethering, gathered its last energies and threw its maddened flesh straight at smug little Missy, guiding its fangs unerringly into its tormentor's throat and ripping out her windpipe and almost all the surrounding flesh, severing both major arteries and sentencing the sadistic little girl to a death whose quickness and relative painlessness she did not deserve.

We are involved here only because the parents of the kids involved have filed charges against the dog owner, claiming negligence and pressuring the DA to bring manslaughter charges. I expect you feel as I do about all that; if you don't, please keep your disgusting opinions to yourself.

One last thing: before the vengeful parents could get to the dog to put it down, it died from the injuries inflicted on it by the children, our hope for the future.