An excerpt from my new short story:

“Jill!” Nazi Pool Mother shouts at me, one hand shielding her eyes from the sun, the other one akimbo on her hip in boot camp fashion. She doesn’t even have a name anymore. It is a widely accepted fact among lifeguards that the housewives the neighborhood association puts in charge of “pool management” (as it appears on my résumé) are the meanest, nastiest, most intolerable people on earth. Especially the middle class ones. Because they’re not as affluent as some of the other mothers, middle class mothers treat it as if it were a paying job that could stabilize the family. The same job their husbands don’t allow them because then the children would grow up to become people like me: cranky and incinerating in a really tall chair.

“Jill! Pay attention!” Nazi Pool Mother begins again. “During your break I want you to unclog the toilet in the boys’ bathroom. It’s stopped up with number two.” I would just love to hear her to say the word shit in her floral one piece suit and knee-length skort.

I slouch in my chair with my hat sinking lower over my face like a lead fish. I must look like Uncle Remus’s Tar Baby the way I’m all covered up while simultaneously melting away. If I can’t hear you, you can’t make me clean up shit on my break.

Nazi Pool Mother taps her foot, “Jill, do we need to have yet another meeting?”

I don’t get paid enough money to clean up some preteen’s prize that he probably left on display for his friends. Not on my break. Not ever. I don’t even know how to use a plunger and I can honestly say I am too good to clean up someone else’s “number two.” Oddly enough, in my three years of working, this wouldn’t be the first job I’ve quit on account my having what I think is a very basic human standard.

Breathe. “Excuse me, but extracting feces from stercoraceous porcelain was not clearly identified in the ‘duties’ portion of the contractual agreement that I signed upon the launch of my tenure at this facility.” Heh, let’s see what she thinks of that. I don’t care, my legs are sweating.

The tapping evolves into a stomp – the first sign of a tantrum in two-year-olds – “Well let’s just see what your boss has to say about your ‘can’t do’ attitude.” Ooh, she’s mad.

My boss travels from pool to pool with a glass of Triple Sec and Coke and keeps a stash of ecstasy in the glove compartment of his white ’86 Ford Ranger; I don’t think he’s going to care. Needing to look in the opposite direction of Nazi Pool Mother, I gaze back at the lake. Dark gun-metal gray clouds collect above the stale water. Either God is answering my prayer or damning me for what I just said...

More to come!