Chronicles of Higher Education

“Absurd Mice: A Campus Novel”
by Finnegan Flawnt

1. PEERS

It was hot. A sweet stench of rotting meat was discernible one day after Professor Grczmczk had died at his desk.

His colleagues knew that something was decomposing but kept quiet. His next door neighbours, Profs Caligari and Wundersam, entered their offices at 7 a.m. and 7:03 a.m. respectively.

Ettore Caligari, a national authority on ancient history, locked his door, let his pants down, logged into his computer and wanked to a 700 A.D. image of a hunky Apollo fornicating a goat.

Prof Wundersam, sweating profusely after a ten mile bicycle ride, stripped naked and walked across the corridor to the restroom, looking like a fifty-five-year old wrinkled Adam. He splashed water in his face, under his armpits and between his legs. He liked the feeling of liquid running down his skin so he did not dry off but walked back to his office wet, leaving puddles on the floor.

At 8:30 a.m. Priscylla Portos, the Dean’s secretary, slipped and fell shortly after entering the hallway, avoiding damage to her head only because she wore a helmet that day. It was emblazoned with the school’s motto: “Parturient Montes, Nascetur Ridiculus Mickey” — mountains will be in labour, and an absurd mouse will be born.

2. PEER PRESSURE

Meanwhile, in the biology lab, Prof Sisyph McMurray was indeed working his way up a mountain: he was shagging his teaching assistant, Nicola Katzinsky, who had been studying under his turgid tutelage for four years already. Each term, Nicola, who was currently spread-eagled on a shabby dissection table between a freshly cut open headless, twitching frog and a book of early medieval fetishism, asked McMurray when she could graduate. And each term, he found another flaccid excuse to postpone her leaving the institution:

“Darling”, she said, “I think I’m ready to leave school.”

“I’ll say when you’re ready, sweetheart”, he said.

They met every other day before class in the biology lab. The slashed squib and the fetish book were necessary for McMurray, 64, to keep it up for more than two minutes.

“There is still so much you can learn from me,” he whispered while massaging her ponderous breasts thinking of me de pulpa verde dulce.

“Like what”, she groaned and reflected on the professor’s gentle way of lovemaking– shortly before the savage savant pulled out of the race.

Nicola would forever associate frogs and fetishs with fucking, and her future analyst, Morris Goldwater of Brooklyn NY, would get richer during her therapy, while her future husband, the noted Wall Street banker, Gardner Easley Honeywell III, would be surprised at the clever things his wife said all the while on her way to one of those extended massive orgasms that shook the walls of their Fifth Avenue apartement.

All ends well that is well, Nicola thought befuddledly and calmed by a deep inner knowledge of things to come. When her professor had finished but she hadn’t yet, she would have to bring her own bacon home while McMurray fell asleep on top of her.

3. DEALING WITH PEER PRESSURE

At 9 a.m. the classes were filling up and Professor Cricket, Dean of the Law school, arrived in his shoddy clothes. He drove a 1967 Carmanghia which he had named “Carson McCullers.”

When he smelled the rot of the disintegrating corpus, he followed it to Prof Grczmczk’s office, closed the door, opened his briefcase, took a vegetable knife from it and stuck it (smiling) deep between the dead man’s shoulder blades, muttering “abusus non tollit usum”.

Then he left for class with a chapped chortle on his lips, not afraid of murderous cliches, his heart a lonely hunter.

Finnegan Flawnt blogs at http://flawnt.me/ and http://flawnt.tumblr.com/