The Office War
by Erin McDowell

           I hid under a nearby abandoned stapler. It had been three hours. Three solid hours of the writing utensils fighting the other miscellaneous office supplies. Nobody was sure how it had started, but we all knew how it would end: with the utter destruction of one of the armies. Ink and metal shards covered the battlefield. The empty cases of pens sat motionless, never to write again.
           I had been a paperclip once. I never had a choice when they bent me. Molded me into the multi-pointed soldier they needed for their assault of the pencil drawer. I had led a cohort of used staples and rubber bands against the seemingly endless stream of wooden adversaries as they poured out of their green cardboard transport vehicles. We had decimated their forces, ripping their bodies apart and using their graphite core as weapons against their fellow pencils.
           I was there when the vicious jaws of staple removers had ripped enemy highlighters apart before they had a chance to retaliate. I heard their screams, watched their fluorescent blood flood over the desk.
           I was there when the staplers released their barrage of living metal missiles at the  hordes of sticky notes, pinning them to walls. They cried out in pain as the pointed metal spikes slammed into their thin bodies.
           I was there when the thumbtacks swarmed the day planners and notebooks, their spiny bodies tearing into the covers of their papery adversaries.
           I knew no mercy; I was not allowed to know mercy. They had made me into something that I never wanted to be; they had made me into a mastermind of killing. I led more and more troops against the flood of blank paper folded into dive-bombers and fighters. Long strings of interconnected humanoid paper shapes encircled our metallic artillery, suffocating the staplers and phone.
           Eventually there was nothing left to kill. I was the only one remaining. As I sat behind the stapler’s corpse, I pondered the meaning of it all. Under different circumstances, I could have worked together with the sheaves of paper that lay strewn, dead, across the battlefield. We could have been anything, a portfolio, a report.
           But all were dead.
           And I grieved for what might have been.