James felt a lump on his shoulder and booked an appointment with his dermatologist, thinking it could be a cyst. But as soon as he removed his shirt, his dermatologist sent him to an oncologist at Northside Hospital, who found lime-sized tumors in James’s shoulder and stomach, a grape-size tumor in his neck, and two strawberry-sized tumors in his abdomen. I’m sorry, will you excuse me for a minute? I’m starving and just got this craving to make myself a nice little fruit salad. Alright, are you still there, reading? I’m back with a tasty bowl of grapes and strawberries with some lime juice dribbled on top. Light and refreshing. Wonderful afternoon snack. Okay, back to the article at hand. The oncology team began a comprehensive treatment plan, targeting the biggest challenges: a grapefruit-sized tumor they found in James’s liver and a peach-sized growth in his kidney. I hate to do this, but would you mind if I stepped away for another minute? I’m still peckish and just got a hankering for a second round of fruit salad. Alright, peaches and grapefruit in the bowl nestled beside plump grapes and ripe strawberries, drizzled in tart lime juice, and I am all set to finish this article. James took a leave of absence from his job and began an indefinite stay at Northside Hospital. You know what? I’m three bites in and this combination of fruits is nice, but it’s missing something. Let me just take a quick look at the notes from my interview with James. Okay, shoot. It seems that limes, grapes, strawberries, grapefruits, and peaches are all the fruits his doctors compared his cancerous tumors to. But this fruit salad isn’t all it could be. Do you mind if I take a longer break? I promise I will finish this, let me just drive over to Northside Hospital real quick. I show my press pass to security and they remember me, they wave me in, and James is sleeping, and I look through his chart, read his doctor’s latest notes, scanning for fruit salad ideas, but there are none. His legs are covered in lumps, though, and I wonder if I might just get a bit of inspiration by feeling the growths and comparing them to — oh, alright, I’m sorry. Sorry. Seriously, I’m here reporting a story for a magazine about his cancer. What do you mean the police are on the way over? I’m not allowed to touch patients I’m not related to? I’m sorry, but this seems like an overreaction. Jail? Are you kidding? I left my fruit salad sitting on my desk, won’t you let me go home and put it in the fridge? You’re shielding my head as you push me into the back of a police car? Federal charges for violating patient privacy rights and trespassing at a medical facility? Taking me to the big house with the real crooks? Jesus Christ, you’re really leading me into the big, open area full of violent and psychotic criminals? They size me up. Know I’m scared. Tell me it’s October and the haunted house is here, lure me into a cell. Make me shut my eyes and reach into the bowl of eyeballs. I feel the slimy grapes, but then something more, something bigger. Two plums. My eyes light up. Plums! The missing ingredient that will perfect my fruit salad, I shout. The big men in the gang ask what the hell I’m talking about, tell me they’re hazing me and those ain’t plums, those are Sick Mike’s nasty nuts. They show me this deranged murderer is upside-down, standing on his head under the table, with his scrotum crammed through holes in the table and bowl so it bobs in the fruit. He’s a freak, the gang leader tells me, and you grabbed his nasty-ass grapes. I tell him no, these are plums, big and swollen. Sick Mike pulls his scrotum from the bowl and flips over, inspecting his genitals. I tell them they should be the size of grapes, but his are too large, they’re like plums or apricots or nectarines. The gang members and I look to each other as Sick Mike’s face falls. He says he’s been in pain for weeks. I tell him I think he may have testicular cancer. The prison doctor confirms my diagnosis, says I caught it in time to cure. Sick Mike demands that the doctor perform the testicle-removal surgery without anesthesia and in the center of the prison yard while everyone watches, a disturbing display of his toughness and mania. The gang leader rewards me with a meal of my choice and his men band together to help prepare my fruit salad, having their fathers and wives sneak in plums, apricots, nectarines, limes, grapes, strawberries, grapefruits, and peaches in their asses. We wash the produce, and while Sick Mike screams as the doctor makes his slice, I finally assemble the divine fruit salad I’ve been craving all day, crisp and juicy and refreshing.

Hi, everyone. Thomas Astor, Executive Vice President of Human Resources, here with a quick update for the entire company. Smith, Sampson, and Barnes has been one of the world’s largest and most successful corporate law firms for over eighty years. It is a privilege to walk into our stately and distinguished office each morning, an august space that, until just now, imposed a traditional business-formal dress code of pressed slacks, crisp shirts, dark blazers, and long skirts. Starting today, however, I am enacting some changes to the guidelines of clothing allowed at work. From now on, huge coffee stains all over the front of a white button-down shirt are permitted. If an employee chooses to dress with a massive brown coffee stain drenching his collar and turning the fabric over his chest translucent, everyone will accept it as normal and not ask him any questions about how or why the stain is there. Also, beginning immediately, our dress code now tolerates gaudy, distracting wrinkles on stained, soaking-wet sport coats. These wrinkles may make you question the employee’s professionalism and ability to manage his wardrobe and, therefore, his entire personal life, but because the dress code specifically allows sport coats so creased and crinkled and dripping they seem to have been used to sop 16 ounces of coffee off the floor, you are not allowed to ask the employee for an explanation of his sartorial choices. And finally, our revised dress code now authorizes employees the freedom to walk around with enormous holes torn through the seats of their pants. These kinds of ripped-apart gashes that give everyone a look at the employee’s old, beige underwear are officially no longer embarrassing; they are sanctioned by the HR team, and no one is allowed to ask an employee to explain how he blew apart his pants, or to speculate with other employees in whispers that it seems like he crouched down too fast when trying to clean up his spilled coffee, and he ripped his pants in a sort of silent-film-style comedy act, but a sad and lonely version because no one was there to see it, and he didn’t realize how foolish and wrinkled and wet he looked until he arrived at the office, locked his door, and had a panic attack under his desk before coming up with an absurd plan to change the dress code. That sort of commentary on a colleague’s choice of dress is no longer allowed, and anyone caught speaking about coffee stains, wrinkles, or shredded pants will be disciplined immediately. Thank you all for understanding these exciting new amendments.

“Plump Parump, Plump Parump,” Harris Herndon cackled, dancing in the hallway behind Patty Parump.

Since second grade he’d tormented Patty, calling her a cow, then a heifer, then a bovine; his vocabulary growing with each language arts unit. But this was the first day of eighth grade, and Patty Parump wasn’t going to take any more.

She spun around, pointing her finger into Harris’s nose. “We know from the World History summer reading that my full-bodied size was once the most desirable look in the world. One day it will become fashionable again. But bony little weasels like you will never be in style.”

Harris’s seven friends leaned back, fanning him like peacock feathers, biting their fingers and waiting for him to respond.

Harris closed his eyes, feigned pain, then pushed his nose up into a snout. “Oink! Oink! Farmer Herndon wants some bacon, and he’s gon’ git some!”

He lunged at Patty, who shrieked, and he chased her through the crowded hallway. She hopscotched over backpacks and books, tears welling in her eyes, until she opened the door to her World History teacher’s classroom and ran into the back-corner closet, pulling the door shut after her.

In the dark, Patty felt her way past coats and plastic bins, searching for the furthest space where she could hide until the wretched day was over. Her hands met the cold, painted cinderblock wall, and then found a creaky, brass doorknob. Wanting to be anywhere else, she turned it and pushed open a small portion of the wall, and she crawled through.

*

Patty landed with a thud on a grassy hill, somewhere far away. There was no Harris Herndon, no lockers, no school, no anything but a gorgeous green pasture and, far off in the distance, a thumb-sized castle, like a drawing from a picture book she’d read as a girl. She squinted, shielding her eyes from the sun, and watched a speck of something leave the castle and rush towards her, growing larger until she determined it was a horse, and on top of it, a strong and regal prince.

Finally he stalled his colt and dismounted, then dropped to one knee before Patty. “A dollop of heaven, you are, my fair maiden,” he said in a rough British accent. Patty’s heart raced. The man wore a beautiful maroon tunic and his eyes, looking up into hers, were as blue as anything she’d ever seen. He reached out and she put her hand in his. “Your soft, full fingers,” he said, “are divine.”

Patty smiled like she never had before — unafraid to show all her teeth, to be herself in her fullest form — but a fierce arrow tore through the prince’s neck and he crumpled at her feet. Her horror lasted only a moment, as a spec grew in the east, another horse galloping towards her. On this one sat a taller, more muscular, statelier prince, who leapt off his steed and bowed before Patty. “My queen, my queen,” he said, admiring her round belly. “Would thou make me the most fortunate man in the village and–“

A long sword, thrown from the west, severed the second prince’s head, and his body collapsed onto that of the first prince. Patty turned and watched a white stallion thunder towards her, driven by the most handsome man she’d ever seen: a fairy-tale prince with broad shoulders, massive arms, and a hulking, hairy chest. He dismounted and offered both his hands to Patty. “I have long dreamed of meeting an ample and hearty lady, and your form surpasses my deepest desire. I am the duke of a prosperous iron-exporting burgh and I can promise you a life of opulence and pomp. Will you grace me with your hand in marriage?”

Patty had never been so happy in all her life. “Yes,” she said. “But on one condition.”

“Anything for you, my robust goddess.”

“There’s someone from my school I want you to meet.”

*

Patty and her fiancée crawled past the coats in the closet and opened the door to the World History classroom, where thirty confused students and one angry teacher glared at them.

Mr. Nance said, “Patty, where have you been? And who is–“

“Bring me Harris Herndon,” the Duke said, standing before Patty with his chest out and hand on the hilt of his sword, his six-foot-six body towering over the small desks.

Harris’s posse leaned back around him, biting their fingers and waiting for their king to respond.

“Yeah, I’m him,” Harris said, stepping forward as the other students pushed their desks to the side, clearing a space for the Duke to approach. Harris licked his lips. “Did Porky Patty pay you to come here and–“

The Duke unsheathed his sword and plunged its razor-sharp blade between Harris’s ribs, puncturing his left lung before tearing open the skin on his back. The other students shrieked as the Duke removed his sword, and then drove it again through Harris’s right lung, sending blood gushing out Harris’s mouth. The children and their teacher scrambled into the hallway screaming. Someone pulled the fire alarm. The Duke slid his blade free again, then heaved it up and over his shoulder in a full-bodied strike to chop Harris’s left arm from his torso; and then he did the same to the boy’s legs. As pandemonium erupted in the halls and the principal announced via the PA system that there was an intruder and the school was on lockdown, the Duke continued butchering Harris’s cold, gray body. When he’d finished, he fell to one knee before Patty, soaked in Harris Herndon’s blood. “I pray I’ve done right by my podgy empress.”

Patty kissed the Duke’s forehead. She led him back into the closet and through the portal just as the SWAT team entered the classroom and found the mess of gory meat, causing the commander to vomit into a trash can and declare this barbarism the vilest thing he’d ever seen.

*

For the rest of her life, living atop her picture-book castle with her dreamboat husband, Patty Parump was showered with love and respect.