In college I took a creative writing class. I was one of the best classes I have ever taken and I really had fun in it. The point of the class was to write short fiction about any topic that sparked our imagination. English being my second language I thought that the class would be way harder than it actually was, and I also discovered that I kind of like writing, which also led me to accept this position for Odyssey! So I thought it would be cool if I shared with you one of the stories I enjoyed writing the most in this class. The genre is actually flash fiction, which is even shorter than short fiction. The story was not based on any real person but it was created under the idea that if we really want/need something we have to fight for it and that it is not going to magically fall in our lap; and that if it does it will not last much. It is a satire story. Enjoy!
The title is "This is a story about someone I used to know":
Laura Rodolfo was sick of being fat. She hated it. She needed to do something about it, but exercise was not an option of course not. She hated exercise too. She was a very particular person. When she was eight, she ate 24 Big Macs in one sitting, no one thought that was weird though, if you only knew what kids can do nowadays, it’s impressive! Ever since then, she fell madly in love… with food. All of her family was almost rickety. Her mom weighted like 40 kilos and her sister was around that weight too. Her dad was very, oh so very tall so even if he was a little bit heavier, you couldn’t really tell because it was all distributed in his long, long, body. Now that I think about it, I have never seen his face, it is always way up in the clouds. Well, since her family was like that, she never thought that she would get fat. But she did. When she was 12, she already had to wear custom made t-shirts and pants, also, that year she broke the hotdog eating competition by eating 423 hotdogs in one hour (crazy I know). By the time she was 20 and weighted 1000 kilos, she knew she had to do something about it. After deep research Laura Rodolfo decided the Detox Guru was her salvation. People said he could make miracles, he was the next messiah. She got his number and decided to meet him. Well, more accurately, he had to meet her because she had not been able to move ever since she was 17 and a half.
The Detox Guru was this tiny, tiny, tiny man. He was maybe as tall as a water hydrant. And he was so skinny. He wore huge lenses that made his eyes enormous. He pulled out his ladder from his suitcase. The ladder stretched, and stretched, and stretched until it was at the same height as Laura Rodolfo’s eyes. He looked at her, up and down, left and right. Then, he took this tiny bottle out of his left pocket. All he said was: “drink this twice a day for one week. That should do the trick,” and nothing else. He put his ladder back in the suitcase and left the house. He never told her was the bottles had, she never cared. She didn’t really question what went into her mouth much.
Laura Rodolfo followed the Detox Guru’s orders. At first it was hard, she needed help from everyone in her house to her the tinny tiny bottles close to her mouth, she was used to eat much bigger things. But then, the treatment started to work! It was magic! Suddenly, she could move her arms again, and most of her neck fat was gone. She realized that she hadn’t actually lost her feet, but that they were under all that fat this whole time! She could walk again. By the end of the treatment, she had her mother’s body and half of her father’s height. She felt so new. But she missed the food. You see, the thing that the Detox Guru never told Laura Rodolfo was that the liquid in the tiny bottles was going to take away her hunger for that week, but that it would eventually come back. Now that the week was over, so was the effect of the treatment. Laura Rodolfo was hungry again. So, so, so hungry. She needed to eat! You can’t really blame her can you? Once the magic wore off, so did the false reality that surrounded it. I never knew what happened to Laura Rodolfo after that, I moved away from her city a few days after the magic happened. I haven’t seen her or heard from her. I imagine she got fat again, it makes sense. But guess what I saw on the news the other day? It was the Detox Guru! Apparently he got his own reality show now. Good for him.
