Prentice, who did not believe in karma, was quite certain he was being duped. But the guys had gone to all this effort so he played along.

“Hey! I think this hand you dealt me was meant for the guy before me,” he said to one of his fraternity brothers who was calling himself ‘the entity’ as a part of the game. “Or maybe it was meant for the guy after me?”

“Hush!” scolded the entity, who was responsible for doling out the cards. “This hand ‘tis yours,” he said with a low and thunderous roll. Impressive, thought Prentice. I can’t even figure out who that is. I wonder how he did that with his voice.  

“Alright, already,” Prentice sighed, rolling his eyes. His body was tingling, probably from all the drinking the night before. The party had been epic. What he remembered of it. “I get it. You’re in charge here,” he said, holding up finger quotes on the word ‘in charge.’ “Higher up on the food chain and all that.” He swung his heavy head to the side, then looked back at the entity. “I feel like the ’tis is a bit much though.” He paused. “’Tis a bit much.”

To which the entity rolled his eyes. Or his version of eyes, at least, as Prentice couldn’t decipher any defined facial features. It was a strange costume. “Move it along,” the entity said, pointing toward an unfamiliar gangway coming off the common area of the frat house. Goddam, he thought. These guys really pulled out all the stops. 

He prepared to protest, but as the tingling in his body subsided, he felt it replaced with a heaviness. He was tired and tongue-tied and his mouth no longer wanted to form words. There was no point in protesting anyhow. He understood that he was to do what the entity asked of him – his personal feelings about his highfalutin speech notwithstanding. 

Even so, Prentice managed to mumble ’tis ’tis ’tis mockinglyas he loafed up the gangway. At its end, he came upon a convex metal door with a filthy wooden door knob promising a colorful variety of communicable diseases. 

“What the hell?” Prentice thought. He wasn’t responding to the door though. Rather, when he reached down to use his signature cardigan sweater as a protective measure against the bacterial breeding ground of a doorknob, he noticed it was gone. Not the doorknob, but his sweater. 

And his arms.

How’d they pull that one off? he wondered. Increasingly confused and bewildered, he slumped down against the wall for a moment. He could admit that he wasn’t feeling great. Not out loud, of course. He still couldn’t talk. And there was no one there to hear him anyhow. Overtaken by exhaustion, he sunk lower to the ground and tried to make sense of what was happening.

He flashed back to being fifteen years old and in his childhood bedroom. It was early morning and the window glowed with a pale rose light from the red dogwood tree. He’d heard the sound of their neighbor’s rooster, Frank, making a ruckus. “What the hell!?” he’d said, as he got up to go to the window. At the time, Prentice had had every reason to be alarmed. He’d thought he was losing his mind because he was certain he’d killed Frank the night before. He’d sprinkled his feed with rat poison so the “little bastard would stop waking him up every morning.”

It wasn’t that bad, he’d assured himself. His father had always bragged about his own teenage escapades. He loved to tell the tale of being responsible for the care of a neighbor’s kitten when he, himself, was fifteen. He thought it would be amusing to lock the young creature in the bathroom with food, a litter box, and plenty of toys. He wouldn’t give it water though. And he kept the toilet lid down. He would visit the kitten every day and was fascinated by how it grew weaker and weaker after just two days. On day three, the kitten died wanting water. When the neighbors returned home, he told the family the kitten had gotten out and ran away. “I put on quite the show,” he bragged. “Tears and everything like a pussy little girl.” In reality, he’d taken the kitten’s limp body and tossed it in the river that ran behind his house; the irony apparently lost on him. “Boys will be boys,” was all his father said. “Harmless good fun.” 

All I did was poison a stupid bird, Prentice had thought to himself – though he wasn’t even sure he’d done that. Because there was Frank, cockadoodledooing his heart out. He’d pondered the possibility that Frank could have been replaced and was appalled by the notion that his neighbors could be so callous and unfeeling as to simply swap him out for another rooster. 

There was no way for him to be certain. Memories of the night before were foggy. His parents had hosted yet another of their high-society parties where the main point, from what Prentice could tell, was to be seen. Like all of the other parties, it had been a terrible bore where he was largely ignored. It was, however, an endless source of alcohol and he had the headache to prove it. As he stood by the window watching the sun crawl up higher in the sky, the sound of glasses being placed unceremoniously into the cupboard reached him from the kitchen as ‘the help’ did their best to erase any evidence of the event. 

He did remember at one point his newest conquest (an amusing title he preferred over ‘girlfriend’) coming through his bedroom window. She’d been crying and blathering on about something insignificant. He just knew that it was good news for him because he could play on her vulnerability to get some action. This was one of the more valuable pieces of wisdom his father had shared with him. And it was one he’d planned to use to his advantage for the rest of his life. (Unbeknownst to him, it was a life to be cut short by a combination of alcohol poisoning and an angry ex-boyfriend.) 

The sound of the dirty doorknob jiggling on the convex metal door brought him back to the present moment. His fraternity brothers must have figured he’d had enough. As the door slowly creaked open, he crawled along the ground and out into a green space. 

A gigantic child walked up to him and screamed, “Ew! A slug!” then proceeded to squash him under her foot. In the fleeting moments just before, Prentice had a split-second thought that maybe karma was real. 

*(Modified excerpts from The Optimist’s Daughter by Eudora Welty)