Fat

By Izaan Hasan

Q. Write the opening to a short story called "Fat". In your writing you should try to create a sense of mood and character.

He burst through the door, all four hundred and fifty pounds of him. He scanned the room and its occupants, staring each one of them down to the ground

“Who ate my chocolate?!” he screamed.

Instantly, thirty accusing fingers sprung into life and pointed in the direction of a skinny twelve year old named Wong Ding Chi .The scrawny child started quaking in his tattered boots, shaking so fiercely that he fell down from his chair. In any other classroom, the children would have burst out laughing, but not this classroom. Not when the Supreme Leader’s son was in the room, that too all four hundred and fifty pounds of him.

“Give me back my chocolate!” the over-sized watermelon of a child shouted.

“ I . . . I . . . I doesn’t gots its,” Wong Ding Chi blurted, fumbling with his words. The colour had drained from his skin .He had heard stories, stories of how the “great fat-one” would eat servants whole if they did not please him. Wong Ding Chi did not want to be eaten alive.

“You don’t have it, eh? We’ll just see about that. Guards! ”

The word had barely left the child’s mouth when two lanky, crew-cut uniformed men burst into the room. Their faces showed no emotion, but they did tell a story , a story of war, of hardship, of sacrifice and of separation.

“Take him away! Strip him down to his underwear if you have to! I want that chocolate! “

The guards willfully obliged, dragging the wailing bag of bones outside. The teacher stood aghast. He was helpless. He could do nothing to save his star student who had once again become the victim of the class’s jealousy.

A tear trickled down her left cheek. She wanted to do something, to speak out, but she was powerless. She knew better than to interfere in what had now become ‘a matter of the state.’

As a child, the teacher had never seen, much less tasted a chocolate so she had no idea what the fuss was about. She sat down on her chair with her head in her hands, whimpering softly, hiding her face from the rest of the classroom.

The wails of Wong Ding Chi echoed throughout the school’s corridors. No one could save him now. The students sat motionless, some cried, some were shell-shocked at the events that had just unfolded, some were having guilt pangs about pointing towards Wong Ding, others were trying to leave the horrendous episode behind and move on. No use crying over spilt milk.

When the school children came out to recess, they saw a bony child dangling by his underwear from a flag-post where the Korean flag was fluttering just minutes ago.

At the base of this flag-post stood two guards, ever-vigilant and ever-ready. Between these two men was a bench on which a child the size of a mini-truck sat. The child was happily munching away at a bar of chocolate that he held in his bucket-sized hands. Kim Jong Un was happy, all four hundred and fifty pounds of him.

Twenty-five years and a loss of two hundred pounds later, Kim Jong Un stood waving to his people from his bedroom’s balcony. His father had died, Kim Jong the second was now the new Supreme Leader of the Communist Republic of North Korea. His old man had taken far too long to die. But power was finally his. It had had to happen eventually.

“You called, your Lordship?” inquired the defense minister.

“Ah yes, Defense Minister. I was wondering last night, Father spent all his life building up the country’s nuclear arsenal. Why not use it, let’s say, against our lovely neighbours , the South Koreans perhaps? “

“A . . . as . . . as you wish, your Supreme Lordship.”

“Excellent. Begin the assault next Tuesday. Not on Monday. Mondays are always such unlucky days .But first things first. Could you hand me that chocolate that’s  on the dresser? “