Dr. Goon and the Lost Souls
[fiction]
Dr. Goon was the principal of Gecko Wacko High School and all the students loved him because that’s how he programmed them, and how did he program them? With the Gecko Wacko De Facto Smack-You-Later. The Gecko Wacko De Facto Smack-You-Later was an archway, kind of like the entryway at an airport that electronically frisks you before you board your plane. Every day when the students came to school, they had to pass through the butt-smacking turnstiles of the Gecko Wacko De Facto Smack-You-Later while staring at a little red lens attached to the arch. The students thought the lens was taking attendance by reading their retinas, but nothing could be further from the truth.
The truth was that Dr. Goon was stealing students’ souls as they came through the Gecko Wacko De Facto Smack-You-Later. Every trip through, Dr. Goon’s device pulled fibers from kids’ souls and wrapped them around thin pins, which were stored in the principal’s secret laboratory. The laboratory doubled as Dr. Goon’s private washroom, so his lab was also his lav.
Every trip through Dr. Goon’s device pulled fibers from kids’ souls and wrapped them around thin pins which were stored in the principal’s secret laboratory. The laboratory doubled as Dr. Goon’s private washroom, so his lab was also his lav.
Each pin was labeled with the name of the student whose soul it contained, and as the school year went on the pins got fatter and fatter while the students became duller and drearier. The less room their souls took up in their bodies, the more room there was for all the test prep the students would need to ace the state exams they would take at the end of the year.
Well, Dr. Goon’s plan worked perfectly and the students of Gecko Wacko High School scored an average of 98% for filling in the choicest circles on their tests. Dr. Goon became the greatest principal the world had ever known, causing principals from every continent (except Antarctica) to come find out how they, too, could suck the life out of their student populations, all the better to cram their craniums with mega-doses of the busywork needed to produce teenagers who never talked in class, never came late, never missed an assignment and never questioned authority.
Then one day a boy named Wiley Zorkowitz had one too many prune sandwiches for lunch (that’s all the cafeteria served, prune sandwiches, and no one ever complained). But after Wiley got his bathroom pass, he soon discovered that a lot of other guys had eaten too many prune sandwiches as well, and the laws of nature wouldn’t permit him to wait at the end of the long line curling out of the boys’ restroom.
That’s when Wiley noticed that Dr. Goon had left his keys in his private washroom door. And like a prune pit being Heimlich’d out of some kid’s throat, Wiley shot across the hall, threw open the forbidden door, and came face to face with Dr. Goon himself, who at that moment was wiring a student’s soul pin to his dead parrot, Parksie, hoping to bring it back to life.
On the wall beside Dr. Goon were the thousand soul pins, each labeled with a student’s name, and since the labels were organized alphabetically from the ceiling to the floor, and because “Wiley Zorkowitz” was the very last label at the end of the very last column, Wiley instantly located his pin and grabbed it up, thinking this must be his own personalized key to his own private washroom, meaning he’d never again have to endure the agony of prune pressure in his private places.
But as soon as Wiley grasped the key—or pin, rather—his soul unwound and hung in the air like a curl of purple smoke. And as Wiley gasped, he sucked in not only a gulp of air but also his own soul—the sum total of all his dreams, joys, loves, and music—which flew into him like stardust disappearing into a blackened sun.
Meanwhile, Dr. Goon was so gobsmacked by Wiley’s interruption that he accidentally stuck himself with the wire he had hooked up to his dead parrot, and in an instant the eyedropper’s worth of energy that made up Dr. Goon’s soul was conducted through the transmitter, causing the parrot to flap its wings, wobble to its feet and say, “Awk! Fill in the circles! Fill in the circles!”
After Wiley had visited the bathroom, he made an announcement over the all-call: “Attention. All students must immediately report to Dr. Goon’s office to get their souls back.” And one by one the students of Gecko Wacko High School were reunited with their wondering, wishing, loving, dreaming, joyfully imperfect selves.
Meanwhile, Dr. Goon, now the only soulless member of the school, was converted into a parrot stand, and after a while his body turned to stone and he was displayed next to the prom wreck in front of Gecko Wacko High School with these words inscribed in the base: “Schools Are About Human Beings, Not Test Scores.”
