Trapped in the English Department: A Comic Mystery

Members of the English Department of Zarathustra College in northern New England are moderately weird colleagues in fair weather, but when a mid-December blizzard traps them in the English Department’s windowless office without electricity or heat, they become strange bedfellows indeed. Wandering about with only the light of a few candles, they trip over what appears to be a body of one of their colleagues. They cannot be sure, however, because this particular body has no head. The president of the college, who bought his Ph.D. from a place called Ersatz University for $24,995, has a head, but that is about all. The dean of the college, Dr. Gross, not only has a head, but he has a brain enclosed in it. However, rather than use it, he spends most of his waking hours stealing gloves, socks, pantyhose and other coverings of human appendages from members of his faculty. The real power in this college, however, belongs neither to the president nor the dean, but to 275-pound Marsha LaMoosey, designer of the midnight Womb Dance and instructor of Womb 101, open to all students who have wombs. The president of Zarathustra’s board of trustees has a romantic interest in LaMoosey, or so it seems until the threads of an ancient mystery portending great wealth begins to unravel.