Written by GarnetAndOpal

It was still dark when Derrick woke to giggles coming from his bathroom. At first, he planned to stride into the bathroom and show his kids his angry face, and tell them to go back to bed. Then he remembered that the kids were at their mom's for the weekend.

Who the hell was in his bathroom?

He quietly peeked around the edge of the door. There were five brown little monkeys on the bathroom sink, chattering away in what sounded like a language. Derrick stood there with half of his mind accepting that there were five little monkeys in his bathroom, and the other half of his mind completely boggled. Monkeys don't have a language, he thought.

Suddenly, he turned on the bathroom light.

"Aaaaaaargh!!" the monkeys screeched, looking at him.

They weren't monkeys.

Oh, they were hairy all right with pudgy little bellies, their bodies all covered in dense pelts like moles, leaving only their feet, hands and faces bare. Their faces were mostly taken up by eyes, large, luminous, round eyes, while their tiny noses pushed up at the tip, and they had rosebud lips. They were like cherubs. Hairy, wingless cherubs. In his bathroom.

"What are you?" he asked. "And what are you doing in my bathroom?"

All five little whatevers started talking at once. "We're cheewumbles!" "Chwummles." "I'm a Schwubble." "Tchwumbles." "We're Chiwumbles."

"Chiwumbles?" he said, while they all laughed.

"We like the orange ones," one of them piped.

"Orange what?" he asked.

At that, the little whatevers jumped up and two climbed on top of one, while another climbed on the remaining one, and they opened his medicine cabinet. There on the top shelf were the baby aspirins and chewable vitamins that Derrick had put there to discourage his kids from eating them like candy.

"The orange ones!" they cried, reaching down the baby aspirin and vitamins.

"Wait a second," Derrick said, "you can't just eat them like candy." To his surprise, they reacted like his own kids. He kept them to one vitamin each and one baby aspirin. Whatever the hell they were, he didn't want them getting sick all over his bathroom.

One of them popped up and said, "To the kitchen!"

Derrick blocked the door. "What do you want in the kitchen?"

"We like the sharp ones!"

"Sharp one whats?"

"Knives!" they cried.

Derrick thought he could reason with them. "Knives aren't to be played with."

"No," the closest one said, very solemnly. "We eat with them."

"Eat what?"

"You!"

Quickly Derrick said, "Hey, guys. What about having a couple more aspirins and vitamins first?"

The little whatevers cheered.

After they finished all the aspirins and vitamins, he introduced them to the painkillers in the medicine cabinet, the laxatives, even his ex's old birth control pills.

It took nearly all the meds in the cabinet before the last one keeled over. There's time to be a Daddy, and this wasn't it, he thought.