On MITTENS

On MITTENS
Memoirs – Part IV
The night after the day I was officially ousted from office as the mayor of Washington, D.C., I was walking the street and trying to think of what to do next, and I saw a pair of tiny pink mittens lying in the street, wet and old and disgusting. They were in the middle of a gasoline and urine filled flow that travelled along the street and into a nearby ravine. I thought of Gwendolyn and the children I’d never have. Just then I heard a faint cry, and I followed the stream into the ravine and into a long concrete tunnel. The cries grew louder, and after another fifteen minutes of wading through filth I found a tiny girl curled up by a grate and weeping.
She told me her story: her parents had traded her to a pawn shop for a new television set. The pawn shop owner flipped her over to a illegal darkroom using child labour to mass-produce photos of puppies to be placed in keychains. She had run away and this is the farthest places she could get to. I vowed to protect her, and we established a lair down in the Washington sewers. My long legs served me well in wading through the dreck, and I constructed a pair of stilts for her that she never took off and she soon felt like they were a part of her body. She made new ones for her arms as well, and would travel around the sewers using all four of her elongated limbs.
More abandoned children joined us over time, and we gave them stilt limbs and taught them how to move through the underground tunnels that covered the underside of the city. The more talented children were soon able to move up and down vertical shafts, and one particularly talented boy appended his stilts with claws that affixed themselves to the gunk that hung on the top of the tunnels.
Soon rumours spread through Washington of the Sewer King and his army of Spider Children. An initial reaction of curiosity and excitement soon gave way to fear, and inevitably a mob was gathered to go down into the tunnels and flush out the oddities.
A triad of girls that we had labeled Listeners was crouching under the grates in the Mall, where they overheard the mob gathering. They quickly travelled to my lair and all of the children were called together. A plan was hastily concocted and, through a series of traps and misdirections, the mob was led on a wild goose chase around the underbelly of the city until they finally trapped us underneath the World War II memorial. Several of the children died when the police condoned the use of a flame thrower, but then the ground collapsed and the golden eagles and stars of the monument mixed with the tar and the sewage and the bodies of dead children.
I hoped to see Jesus again, but he left me to figure out the situation on my own. Some of the children, including the first girl I had discovered all those weeks ago, had protected themselves from the destruction by removing their stilts and creating a canopy out of discarded ceramic tiles that fused with a trove of “I Heart DC” t-shirts to create a strong web. When these children were discovered, they had lost their spiderlike quality with their stilts and were recognized as human children. They were all adopted by Hollywood actors. I got away.