Mr. Rogers' Shoes
TV on. Bowl of cereal. Mr. Rogers.
Mr. Rogers steps through his door, singing a sing-song tune about happy neighbors and such. He's got a big tooth grin stretching floppy thin face skin. He's got the grey hair Grandpa home niceness all about him. I watch him sit down on his bench, take off his shoes. He reaches for another pair of shoes to put on. This is his routine, what he does everyday.
But today is different. Someone has exchanged Mr. Rogers' regular shoes for a pair of ten-inch heels, spiky sharp sex stilettos that want to poke out your eyes. Mr. Rogers grabs these, talking to the camera eye, empty head holding the exotic footwear as if they were his normal pair of faded brown loafers. He slides them onto his walkers, saying something about happiness. From somewhere behind the cameras, someone screams, "FRED, NO!!"
But it's too late. The shoes on his feet, they sprout spider black coil arms with rotating talon mouths. These dance like charmed snakes before plunging into Mr. Rogers' legs, burrowing into his muscles and grinding a tight grip on his bones. The shoes now fastened forever.
I watch the TV as people from behind the camera run out in front. Some of their heads explode, spraying bloody brain mess over Mr. Rogers' living room. These people with the exploded heads, they keep on running around like decapitated chickens, nerve jump-kicking the air, their stumps still jetting out gore.
I watch the TV, the people giving birth to deformed cockroach-infants. Their bellies all swelling to round little melons, a hairy leg rips its way out from the womb. An entire gestation condensed to five seconds, followed by sloppy internal C-section.
I watch the TV, and amidst all the carnage a thunder dark storm cloud is forming. Right in the middle of Fred Rogers' living room, a gateway to Hell has been opened.
A skeletal demon with flapping bat leather wings bursts out of the swirling black cloud.
"For years immemorial have we waited," it says, a mouthful of teeth spitting fiery thick sea-drowned sounds. "For countless aeons have we slept beneath the churning sands of time and terror, awaiting this day, when the one you call Rogers would adorn his leg-ends with the accursed footwear of Rotillag the Terrible, forever freeing us from our black iron prison in the abysmal depths of Demrag the Black Ocean.
And now, in the name of my mighty race, the Arcturians, I claim the Earth as our dominion, and the Human peoples as our slaves for all of eternity."
I watch the TV, as a thousand gaunt demons pour from the whirling chaos of cloud, screeching machine grate metal music, flaring their angry nostrils, preparing to enslave my species.
I finish my bowl of cold slop cereal, switch off the TV box.
That was the coolest episode of Mr. Rogers ever.