In Which a Character Almost Gets his Comeuppance, but then Ends up Not Getting it For Some Reason or Other

Professor Tomkins was a real jackass. He liked to look down girl’s blouses and tank tops in class, and openly put down the boys in front of them.

“Do you know why the artist employed negative space in such a singular fashion?” He would ask, to which the students would shake their heads. “It’s because all the boys in this classroom have tiny wankerdoodles. It’s a scientific fact.”

He was mean to all the boys, but especially Chuckie, who was fat. Professor Tomkins didn't like fat people. “This answer may have made sense if you weren’t so damn fat,” he wrote on one of Chuckie’s papers. “I find your argument compelling,” he wrote on another, “but you are totally fat.”

One day Chuckie died for some reason. Professor Tomkins didn’t really notice, or care, until he saw yard sale signs posted all over campus. Chuckie’s mother would be selling his stuff.

“Gee,” Professor Tomkins said, “for a fat kid, Chuckie sure had lots of nice stuff.”

It was only a few block’s walk over to Chuckie’s mother’s house. It was one of those split-level structures that were so popular in the 1980’s. “It’s typical,” he said to himself. “Fat people don’t usually have a multitude of stairs.”

Chuckie’s stuff was laid out on totes and orange crates and a card table on the front lawn. His mother sat on a lawn chair in a green sun dress. She was also obese and barefoot and was using a beaten tv tray to hold her cash box, calculator, and tear-stained Twilight novel. It figured, Professor Tomkins huffed to himself, digging through Chuckie’s CD collection. Fat people always read twilight. It’s because they wanted to become vampires and lose weight. After wiping the hoho crumbs off a few Ricky Martin albums, he moved on to Chuckie’s furnishings.

“Oo,” he exclaimed. “Look at this mirror! And it’s only five bucks!”

It was a very strange mirror, in that it was made entirely of a specific sort of mahoganny used only to Filipino blood magicians, and was decorated entirely with their most blasphemous and lurid symbols of necromancy and dark magic. It reflected him back as a man that was younger and much more sexy, but who also worked at B Dalton’s. How would such a morbidly obese person have found such a thing? How would he have bartered for it with his sausage fingers? How would he have afforded it with the ridiculous amount of tuition required to bankroll Tomkin’s salary? Tomkins was not sure, but he had to have that mirror.

Chuckie’s mother gave him an odd look as he brought it up. “That’s very strange,” she said. “I’ve never seen that before.”

“Typical,” he said. “Fat people always try to trick you and drive up the price so they can buy more KFC. WELL YOU WILL NOT FOOL ME. I will give you fifty dollars for this mirror and not a lard-coated nickle more, do you hear?”

“I’m not even sure it’s ours.”

“FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS AND TEN PERCENT OF MY PAYCHECK!”

“What I’m saying is that I’m not sure it’s mine to sell...”

“FOR LIFE!”

“OK then.”

How clichee, Professor Tomkins thought. Fat people always caved at the first offer. They were not smart at all like him. He ran all the way to his office and asked his student aid to nail the mirror to the wall and go put something sexy on. When she refused he fired her and made a mental note to shred her transcripts. He then had a professor with less tenure nail the picture up and fired him too.

Frightening things began to happen after that. He got a student aid who weighed about 140, and when he threatened to fire her, she said she would sue and then passed gas. The walls of his office also started to bleed mucus, and not in a good, dadaist way, and a cold wind began to blow through his office.

“Those dumb janitors,” he said, “If they were smart and had a doctorate in art history like me they could take care of this problem, which obviously an air conditioning or the snot congestion filters on the roof..”

One morning he came in and a cold wind whistled down the hallway like the Andy Griffith intro in a minor key. His student aid was crouched under the desk, her hands white as a David Matthews concert. “Eraweb!” She shouted. “Eraweb!”

“Stereotypical obese people and your secret language!” He huffed. His muscles froze, a scream trapped in his throat. A steady, howling moan pierced by screams and perforated with sighs and groans and shit manifested in an icy blast. His desk was coated in frozen snot, his papers trapped under the translucent bubbly goo like flies locked in a plastic ice cube. His eyes followed the snot up the walls to the mirror. Coated with frost, one sentence was etched on its sworling, blood-red surface.

“I’d come out and do something really scary if I weren’t so damn fat.”