Send in the cavalry

"Classically," said Leslie daFox, "the four horsemen of the Apocalypse are considered to be metaphors.  Each is the personfication of a human condition, and if you were only cleverer I would call this anthropomorphisation and relate it back to the third series of How I murdered your mother, the sitcom I won my first thirty awards for writing."  He looked around the room, hoping against hope that there would be a spark of recognition, if not for what he was saying then at least for the comedy show he'd written single-handedly (and two-fingeredly) for four seasons before the network had given him a staff of writers, a bigger salary, and an ulcer.  Instead there were blank faces (most of the first two rows, all women, all the wrong side of middle age, and judging from their homework, all writers of Harry Potter slash fiction), confused faces (generally people on the edges of the class, though he now knew that Mr. Harrison was just in denial about his deafness), worried faces (mostly students who needed to pass this course as part of their degree program and were scared it was too much like work) and dead faces.
"Can anyone name another example of anthropomorphisation?" he asked wearily.  A door creaked, and he saw one of the Camberwick Green security guards sidling in at the back, clutching a clipboard defensively to his chest.  Leslie felt slightly relieved that he'd managed to ask the question before the guard had arrived, as the guards here were actually very good at answering them, which upset the audience even more.
"No?"  Leslie scanned the faces of the audience, suddenly aware that his mental catalogue last time had included an item that had been wrong.  Let's see, he had the blank faces, the worried faces– a hand had been raised.
"YES?" he shouted, but the room was large and no-one here seemed cowed by it.
"Er, SpongeBob Squarepants?" said a thin man with a pointed nose and rheumy eyes.  His lips were pale and thin, as though he spent a lot of time compressing them tightly against one another.
–worried faces, confused faces– what?
"What?" he said.
"SpongeBob Squarepants.  You know, he lives in a pineapple... under... the sea."  The young man trailed off while Leslie realised that he'd seen the cartoon creation that was being referred to when his grandchildren had come to visit.
"I... Well...," Leslie tried to figure how to say no, given that the answer was actually yes.
–confused faces, dead faces.   Wait, what?
"What?"  He scanned the audience again, and sure enough, there in the middle were two elderly women with blue-grey faces that looked very dead.  "Can someone wake er, thingy, there, in the middle?"  He pointed, and slowly, reluctantly, a neighbour gently shook one of the dead women.  They wobbled a little, and then keeled over, faceplanting the desk in front of them, and revealing a plastic-handled knife sticking out of a large bloodstain in the shirt on their back.  There was a scream, a pause while the room worked out what was happening, and then more screams.
The security guard hurried forward, and Leslie noticed that the skinny young man had put his hand back up and was waving it back and forth with more enthusiasm than anyone had managed in any class previously.
"Yes?" he said, watching as the security guard tried to find a pulse on a corpse.
"Am I right?  About SpongeBob, I mean?"
Leslie nodded, aware that since no-one else was paying any attention he could deny it later.  The security guard had just sat the corpse back up, driving the knife further into its back by the look of things.
"Cool, dude!" said the skinny guy, and turned to his neighbour, presumably to boast about his intellectual capacity.
"I think this one's dead," said the security guard, now dragging the corpse up onto his shoulders.  "I'll just take it out back and tidy it up a little.  We'll need to talk to you later about how it happened."
"What?  How what happened?"
"Well, it's a locked room mystery, isn't it?" said the guard sounding suspiciously happy.  "Like in one of your books.  So it's a test, isn't it, right?"
"No," said Leslie, who'd never written any crime fiction in his life.  "And no, and more no.  That's a dead body, and I don't know how it got in here, but I'd like it taken away and identified.  And crossed off my class-list."
"Right you are, sir," said the guard, winking when he thought only Leslie could see.  "Jolly good!"
"Did that... thing die in here?  While we were in here?"  The speaker, a young girl, looked ghoulishly thrilled, and several of her classmates started jotting things down in their commonplace books.
"Bravo!" said Leslie, suddenly proud of his class for the first time since he'd started teaching again.  "Every event that happens, no matter how tragic, or personally affecting, can be used as the plot for a story, or even just background material.  Now, who can tell me about corpse worms?"
The fastest hand up was the woman whose last Harry Potter fiction had featured some fairly graphic necromancy, so Leslie picked someone else instead.

Apocalypse 7am

The checkout man in the DVD rental store frowned at the woman stood at the till. He picked up the DVD cover that she'd selected, and pursed his lips.
"This isn't a very suitable film for young children," he said. "I don't mean to pry into your life, but store policy is to remind customers with small children-"
"I'm not babysitting my child with your film," said Mummy briskly. "I'll be watching it after she's gone to bed. But that said, if I want to introduce my child to masterworks of film, or to explain to her what war is really all about, what concern of that is yours?"
The man looked a little taken aback. "This is really quite a violent film, and for a small child-"
"I said IF, and my question was actually about your right to stick your nose in where it's not wanted." Mummy's voice was growing icy, and Toddler, near her ankles, started giggling.
"I did a degree in social work," said the man in a much quieter voice. "That'll be three pounds, please."
Mummy paid, and the checkout man found the right disc and slipped it into the cover. He didn't dare say goodbye.
"Silly man," said Mummy on the way out, ostensibly to Toddler, but just loud enough to be overheard. "He's not wanted for his opinions."
Mummy had a few other shopping errands to run, and by the time they got home it was just after 9pm, so Mummy slipped the DVD into the player, left Toddler on the couch in front of the television, and went into the kitchen to prepare dinner. The budgerigar, a school pet that Toddler had been tasked with looking after for the week, squawked from its cage on the counter when she came in. Mummy glared at it until it put its head under its wing, and unpacked the shopping, putting things into cupboards and the fridge. Deciding that after all that she didn't much feel like cooking, she called for pizza.
Back in the living room, she found that Toddler had already started the film playing and was sat attentively in front of it. She smiled, she'd always found the start of the film boring, and sat on the couch. Toddler could watch until the pizza arrived, then she'd turn it off.
When she woke up again, it was 4am and Toddler was curled up next to her asleep and the film was playing through again, somewhere near the end. She yawned, stretched, and took them both off to bed.
In the morning she discovered the pizza on the front step, with an apologetic note saying that pizza delivery boy had rung eight times to try and get her to take the pizza. She checked her phone -- yes, he'd rung there three times too. And the note looked like he'd written it in his own blood, so she'd accept it was her fault. She picked it up, and went back into the kitchen.
There was the fragrant smell of olive oil in the air, so she looked around, just in time to see a bedraggled-lookie budgie flinching away from a lit match. The oil caught and the budgie disappearing in a column of fire and a single, despairing squawk.
"I love the smell of napalm in the morning!" giggled Toddler, waving the match excitedly.
"Oh good," said Mummy, catching it and blowing it out. "No more pets for you, little man."