Fat

         The children were fat. Not chubby, portly or stout, but fat. Mrs. Grimm stood in front of the classroom, the primary point of attention to twenty-two sets of close-set beady eyes, pinpricks in flaccid faces, strangely resembling marshmallows. Little things started to become more noticeable, as each day passed for Mrs. Grimm, teacher of the fourth grade at Portman Elementary School. The increasing number of glassy eyes. The occasional drool from the corner of a mouth. The snort following a somewhat too long of a laugh.

         The nagging suspicion finally grew to a screeching crescendo one cold fall afternoon, immediately after school. Mrs. Grimm had packed her handbag and was exiting the building, walking into the drizzle of the ever graying sky. As the door closed behind her, she was startled to find one of the Nubbins children, one of seventeen, if her count was right. It was the fifth-youngest, but it was hard to tell, for they mostly looked alike, morbidly obese with coarse, red hair. Little Lucy Nubbins was standing in the rain, facing the door and looking at Mrs. Grimm with an odd smile upon her fat lips.

         "Oh, Lucy," Mrs. Grimm said with a start, "you surprised me. What are you doing out here?" Little Lucy Nubbins said nothing but only held out her fat little, 8-year-old hand. Mrs. Grimm leaned in, to try to see what it was that Lucy held. "Oh, Lucy, it's a mouse," Mrs. Grimm said with another start. She realized, obviously too late, that the mouse was dead. Lucy rubbed the small thing with her left thumb.

         Mrs. Grimm climbed into her car and looking in her rearview mirror, could only stare at the little girl, ponderously, as she simply stood and stroked her mouse. Pulling out of the parking lot, Mrs. Grimm headed north, for about sixteen blocks, when she passed the Nubbins home and, as an automatic response to her previous interaction with Lucy Nubbins, observed the homestead. And oddly, though coming as no surprise, Mrs. Grimm noticed Mr. Nubbins standing in the front yard, wearing nothing but his boxers and swinging a fly swatter at, Mrs. Grimm surmised, a particularly annoying fly, which from her vantage point, could not be seen. Mr. Nubbins paused for a moment, waved at Mrs. Grimm and then continued his frantic and spastic attempts at Musca domestica assault.

         It was that evening, at the school's annual "Coffee and Chat" in the school cafeteria when the suspicions, the concerns, and the overall concern came to a head. Forty-seven sets of parents with a large herd of unruly, drooling children converged on the cafeteria, all looking for free cookies. Every teacher, with the exception of Mr. Hausenpheffer, the science teacher, who was home sick with the flu, stood smiling as the invasion began. As Mrs. Grimm traversed the mind-numbing landscape of parents, smiling and interacting, she could feel her IQ shrinking, or at least giving the impression of shrinking, like an ice cube on the beach. After a few minutes of immersion in a conversational pool of flatulence and professional wrestling, Mrs. Grimm made the horrifying observation that every single parent in that room was morbidly obese, painfully obtuse and overall dim-witted.

         That evening, after the social, Mrs. Grimm packed her suitcase, grabbed her copy of "Common Sense" by Thomas Paine, and bought a one-way plane ticket to Seattle. Her class, the next morning, sat for forty-minutes before they realized they had no teacher.