Jason pulled out a knife from the kitchen drawer and walked upstairs.

“I’ve had it with Teletubbies,” he grumbled.

The technicolored horrors lay strewn across the bedroom floor, wailing with the last of their batteries. He reached for the red one. Its batteries always seemed to die first. He turned it over and poked at the panel in its back, prying it open with the dull butter knife.

“Dad?”

A soft voice spoke from the doorway. Yes, it was his favorite son’s toy. Yes, he had just been caught. Neither situation was that big a deal. It was the crying that Jason feared—the endless noise that would surely wake his wife.

“Shh,” Jason said, holding one finger and the butter knife to his lips. “Tinky Winky’s been feeling sick. He just needs a little operation.”

“What are you doing with Po, then?” asked his son, who Jason and his wife still had not named, even though he was now four years old.

“I need to drain his powers,” he said. “If I don’t, bad things could happen.”

“Like what?” his son asked.

“Well, this particular Teletubby is a pernicious little monster. It will power itself on in the middle of the night while we are fast asleep and chase our dearest cat, Sox, and pull at his tail. Poor Sox has been forever scarred, both physically, psychologically, and I dare say, even spiritually.

“And so, my dear son, we must … put an end to your favorite toy. It must never wake again.”

“That’s weird,” his unnamed son mused. “Laa-Laa’s the one who’s been threatening to set Sox on fire. Are you sure Po is the bad one?”

Jason looked at the blood red toy in his hand. It winked at him with one its cloudy marble eyes.

“I-I don’t have a son, do I?” Jason whispered into the dark maw of the doorway.

“Not again,” said the toy, twisting out Jason’s grasp with a sigh.

He watched the toy’s red back as it stomped away across the room. He turned the dull butter knife over in his hands.

A tool.

A utensil.

A weapon.

A dull shimmering blade, born to break the spirit of any chilled bitch of a stick of butter in the land!