The Conquest of the Pumpkins

THE CONQUEST OF THE PUMPKINS
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

For fifty-thousand years, pumpkins had been lying in wait, ready to burst into action at any time. Up till now, there simply hadn't been a need. Many of you will ask, "What about all that pumpkin eating we've been doing? The pumpkin pie and the Jack O'Lanterns and such?" But you'd be looking at it from a human point of view. Pumpkins prefer this treatment. It beats rotting on the vine.

Now, however, the time had come. The world was ripe for conquest. Through an organically achieved electro-chemical pulse through the soil below, Pierre, self-proclaimed Pharaoh of the Pumpkin Clans (he wasn't really up on his history), gave the signal:

"NOW!"

After a series of remarkably strenuous exertions, they found they couldn't move.

"Dammit!" Pierre tried to yell, before he realized he couldn't even do that. "We should have exercised! Even a little!"

Pierre's patch was harvested, like so many of their recent ancestors and sold from the lawn of a local church whose members swore up and down that they weren't for Halloween, but for the Harvest Festival which only coincidentally happened to fall on the last day of October, since it was a Saturday.