An Occurrence at Omega Phi Fraternity

Portions of this story, as well as the entire premise, have been taken from Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge

Chapter I

A young man stood in a room in a fraternity in a small liberal arts college in western New Hampshire, looking into the drink swirling in his hands below. The man stood to the side in a room filled with eight other people – two brothers of the house he was standing in, a sketchy alum, fellow freshmen, and an assortment of other revelers. A variety of posters were upon the wall, and rap music played from a MacBook’s speakers.

The man who was engaged in dropping Slither was apparently about nineteen years of age. He was a college student, if one could judge from his outfit, which was a spandex onesie festooned with a feather boa. His features were glazed, his jaw slack and gaze unfocused. He wore stubble and an unkept goatee was trying to grow, but no moustache. His face was young; evidently this was no upperclassman familiar with hard drinking. The liberal fraternity code makes provisions for drinking with many kinds of persons, and freshmen are not excluded

He closed his eyes in order to fix his last thoughts on his mom and that girl in his bio class he had a crush on. The Slither, tinted a dark purple by what some said was concentrated grape juice and others said was cough syrup; the boa playing around his neck, the posters, the creepy alum – all had distracted him. And now he became conscious of a new disturbance. Striking through the thought of him getting up the courage to ask that girl to Dirt Cowboy was sound which he could neither ignore nor understand, a wobbly, pulsating noise like someone shaking a metal sheet to generate storm noises for a middle school play. He wondered what it was, and why it wouldn’t stop. Its recurrence was irregular, sometimes it would speed up, and at other times it would become preposterously slow. The sounds hurt his ear like a boxing glove. What he heard was dubstep.

He unclosed his eyes and saw again the Slither below him. “If I just toss it back,” he thought “I might just go out to other frats and have a good time at my first Winter Carnival.”

As these thoughts, which have here to be set down in words, were flashed into the doomed freshman’s brain rather than evolved from it, he began to lift the cup to his lips. The liquid inside tilted towards his mouth.

Chapter II

Michael Ellis was an ordinary college freshman, from an upper-middle class New England family. Being at Dartmouth, and like other Dartmouth students technically an alcoholic, he was naturally excited for Winter Carnival and ardently devoted to the prospect of drinking for three nights in a row. Circumstances of an imperious nature, which it is unnecessary to relate here, had prevented him from dropping Slither fall term, and he longed for the larger life of the hard guy, the opportunity for distinction. That opportunity, he felt, would come, as it comes to all on big weekends. Meanwhile he did what he could. No beverage was too watery for him to drink in order to get fucked up, no adventure too perilous to undertake if consistent with the character of a freshman who was at heart a frat bro, and who in good faith and without too much qualification assented to at least a part of the frankly villainous dictum that all is fair in frat life.

One afternoon while Michael and his friends were sitting on a ratty couch in his common room, some guy who lived the next floor up walked in and sat on the couch.

“What’s up?” asked one of Michael’s friends, who apparently knew the guy from Bio 11 or something.

“OP has Slither tonight,” said the guy “I hear they put blood thinner and codeine and Xanax in it.”

“When is it?” Michael asked, still wondering who the guy was.

“The brothers start at, like, five, and I think they run out really fast. Also, you have to know a brother to get any.”

“Supposing a freshman – a student of raging who knows a couple of brothers – should wander in and get his hands on some Slither,” said Michael, smiling, “what could he accomplish?”

The guy who knew Michael’s friend reflected, “I was there fall term,” he said, “and that shit gets you totally fucked up.”

Chapter III

As Michael Ellis dropped Slither, he lost consciousness and was as one already blacked out. From this state he awakened – ages later, it seemed to him – by the sensation of a sharp tapping on his shoulder, followed by the smell of vomit. The tapping was persistent and seemed to continue with an inconceivably rapid periodicity. The vomit smell, for some reason, reminded him of the Foco pizza he had eaten that night. These sensations were unaccompanied by thought. The intellectual part of his nature was already effaced; he had power only to feel, and feeling was torment. He was conscious of motion. Encompassed in a luminous cloud, of which he was now merely the fiery heart, without material substance, he swung through unthinkable arcs of oscillation, like a vast pendulum. He was really fucked up. Then, all at once, with terrible suddenness, he heard the sound of more rap music and his name, repeated over and over again. The power of thought was restored; he knew that he had booted all over the floor and that his roommate was trying to get him out of OP before he embarrassed himself even more.

He was not conscious of an effort, but a sensation in his arms informed him that he was trying to stand up. He gave the struggle his attention, as a senior might go to a football game drunk, without interest in the outcome. Wow, what a good job! He was actually making some headway in getting up! Oh, wait, now he stumbled into his own boot. He fell back to the ground and watched with interest as his floormates grabbed him by the shoulders and hauled him to his feet, dragging him out of the room and onto frat row.

He was now in full possession of his physical senses. His vision wavered and he found it was impossible to focus on anything for too long. His head ached constantly. A feeling of rising nausea was prevalent, and he tried to boot again but wasn’t even coordinated enough to pull the trigger.

“Maybe you should go to bed, Michael,” one of his floormates said.

He attempted to respond, but found he was unable to. He had come out of the house facing toward Jim Kim’s house, and decided that it was a good time to boot on his lawn.

“Dude, where are you going?” his roommate asked, “Frats aren’t even open yet. It’s eight at night.”

Michael kept walking down Webster, his mind fixed on booting on the president’s lawn. How funny it would be! How silly his friends would think his antics were in the morning! Suddenly, he felt himself pitching forward, and the ground seemed to rush up towards his face. On their own, his hands flew forward and caught him. He lay down, thinking it might be safer for him if he were to stay on the ground, and noticed how beautiful frat row was, when you looked at it; how nice it was that there were old houses falling apart because the money for repairs was spent on Keystone, how the flow of drunken people in and out of them created a delightful cacophony.

“Hey, we’re going to the Hop now,” he heard a voice call, rousing him from his dream, “you can come with us or you can keep sitting there.”

All night long he traveled, trying to get to the Hop, where they would make mozzarella sticks, although they would also be really upset when he asked. What astounded him so completely was that it somehow took him more than ten minutes to walk across the Green. By the time he got inside, he was sore, his head ached, and he had fallen down two or three more times. He looked at the a poster with upcoming performances, certain that there was a message hidden within – and only he was drunk enough to decipher it. He was sure that he heard whispers over his shoulder, people saying things like “shitshow” or “you need to get the fuck up.”

Somehow, Michael realized he had fallen asleep standing up in the Hop, for he now sees a different scene – or perhaps he blacked out, and was just now waking up, for he discovers he is in bed, with a splitting hangover. As he is about to get up and dry heave in the bathroom, he feels a splitting pain in his head; a blinding light blazes about him – then all is darkness and vomit smell.

Michael Ellis was passed out; his body, fallen over, lay in a puddle of vomit in a room in Omega Phi.