Clean your room... or else.

Bob was staring at the tree, drooling. One eye was more closed than the other, and they were slightly crossed. Nice touch.

“Bob,” the tree said. He continued staring. “Bob,” it repeated, more insistent this time. He was still completely oblivious. “BOB!”

Bob jumped three feet in the air and landed on the lawn chair painfully. For the chair. As he gazed around in dazed shock, he realized that it HADN’T been the tree speaking to him at all; it was his mother.

He looked up at her as innocently as was humanly possible. “Yes, mom?”

Her response wasn’t what he’d been expecting. “Clean your room. I thought I told you that before.” By the sound of her tone, it certainly SOUNDED like she’d said it before. Many times, in fact. Possibly more than any human being could count. But that was just Bob’s experience talking.

“Oh.” It was all he could think of at the moment, so it would have to do.

“Well?” She apparently expected him to do it. Surely, she knew by now that it was quite impossible to clean that bedroom? You couldn’t even see the floor. That’s why Bob hadn’t been in there in weeks.

“I’m going,” he muttered, getting very slowly off the lawn chair. His backside still hurt from the landing. He rubbed it absently, knowing it would be bruised later.

“Hurry up, will you?” his mother asked, exasperated. She stormed back into the house. Bob snorted at her as she went. So bossy. Who did she think she was? Oh, yeah--his mom.

Bob dragged the lawn chair to the patio, making a rut in the already desecrated lawn. A streak of brown dirt added a nice change to the dead, dried grass. One of Bob’s old chores was to take care of the lawn, but… it didn’t exactly happen. He accidentally watered it with laundry detergent. He had mistaken it for fertilizer. As it happened, that day he’d mistaken the fertilizer for the laundry detergent as well. Whoops.

He remembered all too clearly. A whole load of wash ruined… His mother had not been happy at all.

He pondered how a person could make such a stupid mistake as he carefully went up the stairs. He wanted to make sure he didn’t do it the way he usually did. Unfortunately, his caution didn’t help. He tripped up the stairs. Again. What kind of person trips UP the stairs? Especially if it’s only three steps.

Bob felt like a loser. Sure, everyone at school called him one. He’d never cared before. Now he just felt like one. Maybe they were right… nah.

He reached for the handle, then pulled his hand back as though it had been burned. He prayed that it wouldn’t be as bad as the last time before opening it agonizingly slowly…

It was just as he’d feared. The Star Wars action figures were staging an epic battle against his younger sister’s Barbie dolls… how had they gotten in his bedroom again? Bob decided he didn’t want to know. His pet snake had somehow gotten out of its tank, and was now reading a National Geographic magazine on the bed, which was across the room from the tank. A three-month-old slice of pizza was now moldy, and he could’ve sworn that there was a family of flies sitting on it. The rest of the room was too grizzly in detail to explain here. All you need to know is that Bob would probably die trying to clean that room.

“Oh, dear,” Bob said unhappily. He wondered how his mother had been able to even look at his room without calling 911. He decided that she had probably just assumed that it wasn’t clean anyway before telling him to make it so.

“Back, Darth Ken!” the Luke Skywalker figure shouted in its squeaky voice. It did a series of flips and slashed at the male doll with its plastic lightsaber.

“Never!” the doll responded. Bob sighed sadly. Not again. Hadn’t those two made up yet?

He shut the door again and went to get the snow shovel out of the garage. The mess was so out of hand, you literally could not see his floor. By the time he got back, he noticed that one of the female Barbie dolls had thrown herself in front of the Ken doll when the Han Solo figure shot at it with its tiny weapon, thus sacrificing her beautiful, rubbery face. The Ken doll was distraught and bent on getting revenge.

“You killed Kenzie!” it screeched. The Star Wars action figures tightened their defenses and pulled out the small tin of their weapons. Bob remembered that he had stored them all in there so they wouldn’t get lost. Hopefully, the action figures wouldn’t be able to get the tin open.

“Will you all just shut up? I’m reading about an albino hedgehog,” Gary the snake said from the bed.

“Since when do you have a British accent?” Bob asked in surprise. Gary tilted his scaly head and hissed in amusement.

“Since when do you have a shovel?” he countered. Satisfied with his owner’s dumbfounded-ness, he went back to reading the magazine. That was when Bob decided to begin cleaning. He set the shovel down and pushed, squeezing the sea of mess into a more compressed space. He heard a small shriek of panic from the moldy pizza.

“Fly away!” screamed a tiny voice that Bob could barely hear. Five flies buzzed quickly out the window, which was ajar slightly. But wasn’t there a screen? That was when Gary launched himself into the window, causing it to close the rest of the way. The flies pounded on the glass with their tiny legs, begging for mercy. Gary flicked his tongue at them.

“Couldn’t resist, old chum,” he said to Bob. Bob tried his best to ignore the commotion in the bedroom as he cleaned with all his might. At the moment, however, he was just trying to make a path safe enough for him to walk through.

“Surrender or die!” the Barbie dolls commanded. Each held a toothpick in their plastic hand.

“We shall never give up! The Force is with us!” the action figures responded with great strength in their small voices. Sensing a particularly interesting battle coming on, Bob paused his own battle against the mess to watch the action.

The dolls and action figures charged each other. The tin of weapons was still shut tight; what were the Star Wars guys using to fight the Barbies? “You’ve got to be kidding,” Bob gasped. Matches. In front of his horrified eyes, a Barbie doll’s hair caught afire and the acrid smell of melting plastic filled the room. Another soon followed suit.

“No! Cut it out!” Bob shouted, forgetting the ocean of mess on the floor. He ran to the desk, where all this was happening, and scooped up all of the Star Wars guys. At the same time, miraculously, he managed to knock all of their matches into the trash can. He ran to the Tupperware container by the bed and dumped them in, quickly snapping the lid shut before they could escape.

The screaming Barbies were attempting to put out their heads with Bob’s video game cheats. “Put those down!” he shouted at them, rushing over to the desk again. He snatched the singed papers from the dolls and tossed them to the side before grabbing all the dolls- except the Ken.

“You won’t get me!” it taunted, hopping off the desk and scrambling under the bed… the one safe place. Bob snarled in frustration and stepped out of his room, tossing the Barbies into his sister’s room across the hallway.

Then Bob really attacked the mess with a vengeance. Gary was so frightened of his furious master, he actually got back into his tank without a fuss. Bob took a folded trash bag out of his pocket (he’d gotten it when he grabbed the shovel) and began tossing everything he could get his hands on into it. When the floor was picked up, he went for the desk next. All the mountains of old papers stacked on top of it (serving as perfect launch towers for the dolls and action figures) were swept into the recycle bin, and the shelves were reorganized.

Bob was disgusted with himself all the while. All of his friends thought THEIR rooms were messy. Well. They had a lot to learn, didn’t they?

Bob’s bed was next. He didn’t even want to know what had happened to it; he just stuffed all the sheets into the trash bag. He would get clean ones later.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Gary asked. His voice was muffled a little bit by the glass tank. Bob glanced at his pet snake sharply.

“Oh, yeah. I’m pretty sure,” he said sarcastically.

“Be careful if you decide to do underneath your bed, as well.”

“Why?”

“Ken.”

Bob yelped as he felt something sharp dig into his foot. The Ken doll emerged from under the bed, brandishing a toothpick once again. Bob picked the doll up and had only one thought before taking action. The trash bag. Bob threw the doll into the near-bursting bag and tied it shut, then took it out to the garbage can. It was garbage day tomorrow.

Bob went back into his room and was shocked by the difference. Now it just needed to be vacuumed. He found the appliance and brought it back, only to find an army of gum and candy wrappers assembled on the floor before him.

“CHARGE!!!”