Shorty’s Resurrection


Kyle Burkett


This week at the Guild meeting I brought up the fact that Shorty’s parents were probably going to notice that he wouldn’t be coming home for Thanksgiving. This definitely has the potential to blow our cover.

“Well, do you want to go down there and get him?” was the obvious reply from Brittany, and the obvious reply was “Of course not.” However, there were larger issues at stake. We could all be sent to jail. Or worse. They could send us back to high school. So I tried a copout. “I would do it, but I don’t know how, where, or any of that stuff.”

“Don’t worry,” said Dr. Railsback. “We can teach you all of that.”

That’s what I was afraid of.

“Meet us here tomorrow night at midnight.”

“But the building closes at eleven.”

“Be early and hide.”

The next night found me sneaking into the Music/English building and looking around for a suitable hiding place. I knew the English side of the building was out. All the classrooms had rows of desks, and the offices were too sparsely furnished to allow for covert operations. So I turned to the previously unknown side of the building that housed the music department.

The first floor housed the band room, completely unsatisfactory. Large open space with stacked chairs on one side and a grand piano in the middle. I could fit under the chairs, but who wants to be crammed like a sardine beneath a stack of chairs? Second floor wasn’t much better. The recital hall could have worked were it not for the late night vacuuming going on in there. The practice rooms were too small to really hide in, since they had glass doors. Third floor had more practice rooms and some classrooms not unlike the English side of the building, except they had pianos and carpet. I was about to give up when I struck jackpot. The chorus room. Four risers with enough room to seat seventy-five students forming a gentle curve, providing me with wonderful corners.

I dashed around behind the risers and checked my Indiglo pocketwatch. Ten minutes before eleven. I should have brought something to read. There was a streetlight right outside the window.

Instead I spent the entire hour contemplating the underside of the risers. I don’t think they had been moved in years. I could see how the legs sunk into the carpet. I could see the mossy spilled sodas of years gone by. I could see the complete spectrum arrayed in chewing gum. These observations didn’t really last an hour, so I also spent a good bit of time fretting about what would be required of me when it came to returning Shorty’s breath of life.

A few minutes before midnight I ventured out of my little corner and went up to the fourth floor and met Dr. Railsback, James, Brittany, and the sergeant-at-arms whose name I still didn’t know. Since I don’t know her real name, I might as well call her Kristi. It’s as good a name as any. I expected us to don our robes and descend into the dungeon, but no.

First we retrieved Shorty’s head from the freezer in the faculty lounge. Then we got the rest of his body from a fake section of books in Dr. Railsback’s office on the third floor. Being department head, Dr. Railsback’s office was huge in comparison with the other offices. Besides his own very large desk, there was a small reading area. We once had a Guild meeting in here when a troupe of wandering gypsies was using the dungeon. It’s a good thing Shorty was on the slim side, otherwise he would have had to been cut into pieces to fit inside the bookshelf.

Unexpectedly, Dr. Railsback turned to me and asked, “Have you read Paracelsus?” I shook my head. “Albertus Magnus? Avicenna?” Two more shakes of the head. “Cornelius Agrippa?” One more head shake and Dr. Railsback was enraged. “How do you expect to revive a dead body without doing your research?” I stammered a bit and finally mumbled something about alchemy having been discarded years ago as futile and unproductive. Full of dignity, Dr. Railsback averred that it only didn’t work if you didn’t have the proper equipment. So saying, he reached into the hollow where Shorty’s body had been and withdrew a large wooden staff, carved to look like a writhing snake holding a large crystal in its mouth.

“We’ll need a rabbit, a needle and thread, a knife, and Bombay Sapphire,” James listed. Brittany produced the needle and thread, Kristi the knife, then we went back to the fourth floor and broke into Dr. Gastle’s office to get the gin. Dr. Gastle always keeps a bottle or two on hand as a prize for the winners of the poetry slams. Lucky for us, one of the bottles wasn’t empty yet. We took the half-full gin bottle and the other necessary items down to the recesses beneath the building. I had to lug the body over my shoulders. James had fun pouring sips of gin into Shorty’s mouth and then watching it run out of the bottom of his neck. When we got to our dungeon, James sewed the head back on the body. I don’t know the significance of the green thread. Maybe it’s all Brittany had at her house. Brittany picked up a rabbit from the room with the Writers’ Block and we advanced upon the elevator. Kristi went inside and held down the hold open button. Dr. Railsback drew three concentric circles on the floor with his staff and we lay the body in them. James told me to hold the body up while he gave Shorty a few more sips of the Bombay Sapphire. I remained kneeling on the floor supporting the body during the ensuing scene.

Dr. Railsback positioned himself behind me and the body. We were facing the elevator. James and Brittany stood on either side while Kristi held the elevator door open. Dr. Railsback raised his staff, which began to really writhe in his hand. I was afraid it was going to drop that crystal on my head. That would hurt. The crystal was shining, giving off just enough light to see what was going on. Dr. Railsback began chanting something I couldn’t understand, some kind of cross between “Higgitus Figgitus Miggitus Mum” and “Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo.” Brittany slashed the rabbit’s throat, drenching Shorty’s body in the blood. I got quite a bit of it too. James poured the rest of the Bombay Sapphire on the two of us as well. I soon saw quite a few ghostly heads poke up through the floor of the elevator. I recognized Tony Christopher and Shorty, as well as some other English majors I had seen before but not recently. I guess there’s really only one way out of the Creative Writers’ Guild. They started struggling to reach the body with the blood and gin, but they couldn’t get off the elevator.

“You have to invite him,” Brittany hissed at me.

“Shorty, get over here,” I said. His spirit floated over and started loudly sucking the blood and gin off his clothes. Then he came right at me. Suddenly I was the one floating above the circle, looking down at myself holding Shorty’s body.

“You guys spilled the blood and gin!” shouted Dr. Railsback. “Shorty, take your own body, not his.”

I watched myself stand up and laugh, dropping Shorty’s body to the floor. My body said, “Do you have any idea what it’s like to be short all your life? Being called Stumpy and Shorty and Half-Pint? Do you know how much it sucks? Well I’m not growing anymore! This is my only chance for normal height! I don’t have to be a dwarf the rest of my life, so no more midget for me.”

Dr. Railsback was even more vertically challenged than Shorty. You don’t make short jokes to a practicing alchemist. Dr. Railsback’s snake staff swallowed the crystal and leapt at my face. I jumped back, even though I wasn’t in my body at the time. The snake latched onto my nose and stuck its tail into Shorty’s mouth. My body shook violently for a few seconds as Shorty’s spirit was transferred back to his own body. I, however, through no fault of my own, was drifting towards the elevator. “Come back to your body!” Dr. Railsback called to me. I tried. Really, I did. I had almost reached the elevator when Kristi jumped out and sent it back down. I rebounded off the doors and fell through the floor.

I found myself in a place that looked remarkably like the Vatican, only in miniature. I shrunk down (being a ghost, I could do that) and went exploring. There were people everywhere. No one I knew, but they were doing an awful lot of things I had never had the guts to do. They didn’t look like they were having very much fun, though. We won’t get into that. Anyway, I was just minding my own business when these two buff guys came out of nowhere, grabbed me, and dragged me into one of the buildings. It looked an awful lot like some sort of courtroom, though there was only one seat. That was for the judge, a large red scaly man with horns and a bifurcated tail.

“What do you think you’re doing here?” the scaly man demanded. “Spying? Trying to learn our plan for the Britney Spears takeover? Speak!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said calmly.

“Well, you don’t belong here,” he told me.

“Sorry, I’m under contract,” I replied.

“You were trying to save someone’s life. It negates the terms of your contract. Self-sacrifice and whatnot. Your soul is your own from now on. You’re free to go.”

I was very suddenly rising very quickly through the ceiling and back into the elevator. The doors opened and my body flew into the elevator. I guess they were trying to get rid of the evidence. They never explained later what they were doing tossing me around like that. Anyway, I retook my body and got off the elevator.

“Oh look, he’s back. Time to go,” said James. So we left. I felt much lighter, as though some sort of burden that had been weighing me down for the past two months had been lifted. In a way, it had. I had my soul back, Shorty was alive again, and all was right with the world. I even managed to tie up all the loose ends from the previous stories.

Well, almost.


back to the darkness