Summer of '93, and the river flooded. Earlier that summer, I'd been living in Omaha with my best friend, and had slunk home when another friend -- god, just 21 -- dropped down dead in my prof's house. She was housesitting while he was in Europe.

We still don't know why.

I was doing inventory in a Montgomery Ward's, and there was no water. The stench from the toilets was incredible. And after a day in the attic warehouse, sans AC, toting bales, lifiting bras, the stench emmanating from me was incredible.

I'd go home and bathe from the pickle barrel we stored water in.

That's what I remember from that summer. Death, shit, cheap bras and pickles.

Man, these are very good drabbles.

Help Wanted

I never had a "summer job." I loafed my way from June to September, spending days on the lawn prepping my tan with baby oil and iodine, rubbing lemon in my hair trying to encourage it to get streaks. Sometimes, Mom needed help watering the vegetable garden or pulling weeds out from between rows of carrots, onions and radishes. Rainy days were spent inside with a good book, curled up in Dad’s easy chair before he came home and kicked me out so he could watch the six o’clock news. I loved that summer job of just being a kid.

Tour Time

A couple of summers, seemed he was always heading out on tour, or off into sessions somewhere.

The prep was always major. Arranging dialysis, no matter the city or country. Negotiating medicine, from Dallas to Berlin. Packing the flash wardrobe for a big tour, the casual stuff for something smaller. Dreading anything that took him back to London, because his wife was there, but hoping if he got sick, it would be in London, because the healthcare was free.

Packing, arranging, praying he'd come back sober and unaddicted, praying he'd come back at all. You could call that a job.

Remember when the intern was under the desk? (100 words)

Christ, he sounds like an overprivileged Yalie lecturing inner-city kids in some sort of resume-padding summer job: If you work for the Man and never question the system, you'll get a slice of the pie.

Never mind that he can't even string together a coherent sentence, let alone convince anyone that he actually gives a damn. It's not like he needs this 'summer job,' with Poppy's connections. Try as he might, he could never screw up so badly that he would ever have to face the consequences, personally.

I get up in disgust before I throw something at the goddamnoisybox.

Clever, babe. I wouldn't have guessed you had it in you to be so pointed...not that you could pick a more deserving target in a hundred years.

Too long, but here it is:

J.C. Penny Catalogs

End of May to August. Every day I walked up that platform in 100 degree heat to squat and lift stacks of pages and feed them into the machine. I could stop and lean on a half-empty pallet for a few seconds and watch the pages run up the line. But if my pages ran out, the machine would grind to a halt and the foreman would scream at you over the deafening machinery. Or if you fed the wrong pages into the wrong bin. Or if you fed too much scrap (ripped, folded pages). Or if you didn't fluff enough air into the signatures and the pages stuck together causing a paper jam.

A rude, exhausting awakening for an 18 year old girl. As my muscles screamed in agony every day when I got off work and I downed 800 mg. of Ibuprofen, I tried to ignore the smell of the Ben-gay I'd become addicted to. I winced when getting dressed--the pages left tiny paper cuts all along the inside of my forearms.

It was a means to an end. I only had to serve a 90 day sentence and got $9 an hour. My father started work in the very same bindery in 1965. He was paid $1.62 an hour and worked in that department for six years.

Six years.

I've suddenly remembered this

Daddy was an upholsterer, a damned good one. Every summer he got the contract for reupholstering the school bus seats that needed it. The key to every small businessman's competitive labor rates was his own children's indenturement.

It wasn't that bad, a way to make some extra money--a whole quarter for each seat and back whose covers we loosened, until inflation raised the price to fifty cents each. Plus a chance to be in Daddy's world without anybody else around. People would wander in to chat, and I realized Daddy had an existence I'd had no idea of. And I could wander in from the back garage where I'd been pulling staples out of bus seats and watch him reassemble people's couches and chairs and recliners. He hated recliners. I miss him.

That's a nice one, connie. Reminds me of my grandfather; his first job after high school was as a "tack spitter." I'm not sure when or how, but he ended up being a probation officer in Detroit during Prohibition. I was fascinated by both jobs and always tried to get him to tell stories about them.

My copy edits for Cruel Sister have arrived.

Same copy editor I had last time. Mr. Anal-Retentive Worshipper of the OED Shortened. He of the four thousand post-it notes.

I want a gun.

Erm. So I'm about to do my first formal submittal to a paying market. Got my SASE, got my manuscript formatted, all that.

... er, what do I put in the cover letter other than, Dear So-and-So, attached please find my story "When Pigs Fly." Please let me know if you like it. Signed, me.