SIGHTLESS BUT STANDING TALL

Blinded in a freak accident, this Chatterwell teaching assistant isn't looking back.

by Clarissa Chlamydia

(from "Around the Campus" in the Chatterwell Spectator)

Zachary Smith isn't opening faculty mail anymore.

Every morning at 9 AM, you can hear him rattling his tin cup and singing the Chatterwell College school song as harried undergraduates hurry past with their eyes averted.

Chatterwell, dear Chatterwell, the only school for me/We bring to you our hopes and dreams/For all the world to see!

Zachary Smith believes in Chatterwell College. He shares the Chatterwell vision. But he cannot see. Zachary Smith has been completely blind ever since he opened that brightly colored box of Punkin' Donuts.

How did it happen?

"They call it Spook Detail," laughs the ragged scarecrow with the sightless eyes, shivering outside the campus gates in the cold November wind. "You know, answering phones, opening mail, anything the real professors can't be bothered with. They call it Spook Detail because we're all invisible. Graduate students, undergraduates, alumni with a beef – to the hard-working intellectual professors we're all just ghosts. Lifeless phantoms."

Zachary Smith used to dream of being a lawyer. Or maybe a poet. Or maybe even a surfer. But he was on Spook Detail the day that fatal box of Punkin' Donuts arrived in the mail. "You know, I'd been reading Professor Ghoulson's emails for months, and I couldn't tell you how many crazy messages he received every day. Not just from undergraduates flunking out right now, frightened and desperate for just five minutes of the professor's time. The really sick, twisted, threatening emails all came from alumni – guys who graduated from Chatterwell twenty, thirty, even forty years ago. Guys who majored in totally useless crap like English literature. Guys who never found a purpose in life or even a steady job. Those are the guys who are really looking for payback – the English majors. I just can't believe one of them was smart enough to actually make a bomb."

The bomb blast that killed Professor Scavenger K. Ghoulson blinded graduate student Zachary Smith for life. The professor was entombed in the Chatterwell mausoleum with great ritual and splendor, including funeral games and a human sacrifice. But as a part-time student employee, Zachary was ineligible for any form of benefits or compensation from the college.

"Some people say there's a Chatterwell curse," Zachary Smith muses today, rattling the nickels and dimes in his tin cup. "Some people say this is a college without a heart. But I don't believe that. It was the professors in the English department who pitched in and bought me my tapping cane and tin cup. That's heart!"

Today Zachary Smith sits and begs before the hallowed gates of Chatterwell with a smile on his face, singing the school song and reminding everyone of the real value of a college education.

Chatterwell, dear Chatterwell/The only school for me/A place of hopes and high ideals/And dreams I'll never see!

-THE END-