Chad Pumfrey was the first person to experience this strange phenomenon. He decided at the opening of sixth grade that Barry Butterton would be his own personal target for scorn and ridicule. Chad had transferred in from a neighboring district, so when he learned Barry’s last name, he gleefully began referring to him as “Ton of Butter” along with other less-than-imaginative names. He also poked and pinched and pushed him around whenever he got the chance.
Barry Butterton treated Chad to exactly the kind of reactions Chad anticipated. He was reduced to tears, he shouted back at Chad, he whined and complained to his teachers, he turned and ran away from Chad’s mal-treatments, accompanied by the giggles and guffaws of their classmates.
Halfway through October, something strange began to happen. To everybody’s amazement, Chad’s attempts at humor at Barry’s expense no longer produced any reaction. Barry would simply ignore everything Chad said or did to him. Once in a while, however, after Chad had given up his attack and turned away, Barry would follow him with his eyes and a sinister kind of smile would spread across his overweight face.
Halloween fell on a Friday that year, and as the sixth graders were dismissed to board the buses that day, Chad couldn’t resist a parting shot as Barry walked past him to enter bus number thirteen: “Hey, watch out, everybody! Here comes the Great Pumpkin!” There was a gale of laughter from Chad’s buddies, but Barry’s only reaction was to turn around, look Chad in the eyes with a wicked grin and say in an intense whisper, “Have a great time trick-or-treating tonight, Chad Pumfrey!” Something in the way he said this made the laughter evaporate like a puff of smoke.
Four hours later, Chad and his costumed cronies were crossing the municipal park, making their way to Wood Street, which was well-known as the best trick-or-treating section of town. Their bags were already getting fairly heavy with sugar-laden treasures, but greediness for sweets is a symptom shared by most sixth graders, and this merry band was eager to top off their yearly take with a thorough fleecing of Wood Street’s wealthy warrens.
But suddenly, in the middle of the park, Chad Pumfrey found himself alone. “Buck? Brad? Ollie? Michael? Where...where are you guys? Are you h-h-hiding or something?” There was an eerie, dead silence all around him. Somehow, the lights of the surrounding town had dimmed and the ancient, widely spaced trees of the park stood like foreboding sentinels, each of them casting its own sickly green aura.
Chad felt a rising panic that started in the soles of his Red Ball Jets and surged up into the black pirate bandana swathing his forehead. He continued calling out to his friends, but his words fell dead as they left his throat. He could sense an oppressive Presence in the park--a disembodied, bestial form that was stalking him, toying with him, approaching him from all directions. He wanted to run, but had lost his bearings; he didn’t know which way to turn. He felt paralyzed...rooted to the turf where he stood.
Chad could hear the panting of his own breath, the frantic beating of his laboring heart. But then, faintly at first, but growing slowly louder, he heard the beast approaching. He cast about this way and that, seeking a way of escape, but the rumble of movement was everywhere in all directions, coming toward him through the openings in the garrison of tree-watchers.
Then, staring, dumbfounded, he dimly made out what it was that was encroaching his hapless position. It was a wall of some kind--solid, but uneven and undulating as it moved. A living, pulsating, bulging tide of inward expanding tissue. It was the color of flesh...it was sallow and hairy...it was...
Chad’s eyes bulged in their sockets. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He had to be dreaming. His last piece of candy must’ve been laced with LSD or something worse! The wall of quivering fat was now a ring surrounding him only twenty feet away.
Chad heard the sound of muffled laughter--a voice that was vaguely familiar, though he'd never heard Barry laughing before. The wall was shaking with gelatinous spasms, each of which inched the wall inward. Chad’s panic and fear gave way to something a million times worse...a feeling of impending doom.
He knew that, if he couldn’t escape this nightmare, he was destined to become one dead pirate.
The laughter crescendoed and the adipose wall jiggled ever closer and closer, shrinking his circle of life inch by flabby inch. Chad Pumfrey burst into a fit of rage and leapt forward, trying desperately to attack the wall of fat.
As his fists pummeled it, he could hear echoes of his own taunting voice: “Hey, Ton-of-Butter! Great job in gym class today. You run like a herd of hippos, Fat Boy! Yo! Watch out everybody, there’s a whale in the pool!” On and on the taunting ran, a reverberating record of every unkind word he’d ever hurled at Barry Butterton.
Ploosh! Ploosh! His fists hammered in futility at the fleshy, closing cage. Chad was burning up with sweat, terror, anger: “Butterton, you freak! If you’re behind this, you’ll be sorry! I’ll bust your fat butt, you big jerk!” Ploosh! Ploosh! The wall was now only fifteen feet across. Chad could feel it pushing him backward.
He shot a glance over his shoulder to the rear, raw adrenalin gauging the shrinking circumference of his future. Like a cornered rat, he grabbed handfuls of flab, attempting to scale the fortress of fat. But the greasy slickness of the barricade defeated him and he slid back down into his hole. The enclosure was now ten feet wide.
“Butterton! You let me out of here, you creep! You can’t do this to me!” Ploosh! Ploosh! Ploosh! Eight feet wide. “Barry, c’mon! Enough’s enough, man! I’m warning you, you’re gonna get it when me and my friends...C’mon, Barry, stop this now!!” Ploosh, Ploosh, Ploosh! Five feet.
The laughter intensified and quickened, even as Chad’s breathing became faster and shallower and sweat soaked through his BVD’s and his flashy pirate regalia. “Barry! Barry, please!!” Three feet.
Chad looked up at the tiny patch of night sky remaining above him, vainly hoping for some miraculous way of escape. Several stars shone down with cold indifference to his plight as the inward-swelling blubber encased him in its soft, suffocating embrace.
Buck, Brad, Ollie and Michael found their unconscious friend at the foot of an ageless oak tree near the center of the municipal park. They hadn’t even noticed his absence during their foray of the brightly decorated houses on Wood Street. But after Chad returned to school from his stay at the trauma center, all his friends noticed his marked avoidance of their largest classmate.
From that October on, anyone who dared to ridicule the Round One, lived to regret it.
MNA October 30, 2014
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