Bathhouse Blue

How to Get Fired and Land a Dream Job

by Bryan Edenfield

I lost my job to a giant crane fly but I was unhappy so it was a blessing in disguise.

Along the coast I stood guard at the entrance to the Driftwood Cathedral, 400 years old and very historic. My job was to make sure no one desecrated the place.

Then one day I think last Thursday just before the sun fell, some ruffians came and asked me, “Who exactly do you think you are?”

I didn’t know the answer so mumbled something underneath my breath, not really words but like song notes in whisper key. I didn’t recognize the ruffians but they were nasty humans and they spit a lot.

“What are you? I can’t really tell. Are you anything?”

“Me? I guard the entrance to the Driftwood Cathedral by the Sea. I’m a person.”

“Yeah but what are you?”

“I guess I can’t really say.”

They laughed at me without noise but with eyebrow movements like a jaw dropping and teeth chattering, but that’s not illegal. So, they walked in and I didn’t stop them because they hadn’t yet desecrated anything. That’s the problem: I can’t see the future. Everyone can enter the Driftwood Cathedral unless they enter it with intentions to desecrate, but I cannot read minds. Besides, sometimes you walk into a room with no intention at all, but once there, a whole flood of intentions come a-bounding. For example, I told them not to spit inside and they said they had no intention to spit inside obviously. I reckon they had no intentions at all. But once they entered, some intention sneaked in with them and crawled into their bodies, and that intention was the intention to piss everywhere. Perhaps they entered with the intention to general mischief but I didn’t pick up on that and I’m not sure that’s an actionable offense.

As you may or may not know, nothing is inside the Cathedral but sand and some ornamental shells arranged on the curled pieces of bleached wood that make the cathedral’s walls, domes, and pinnacles. Sometimes there are piles of stone along the edges with seashells arranged in semi-circles around the piles of stone, but this changes over time. Sand crabs saunter in and knock over the stones and take the shells. They’re allowed to do this and this is not considered a desecration.

I don’t remember if there were any stones or sea-shells arranged in semi-circles around their vertiginous piles, but there was dry sand and no wet sand, because the Cathedral is well protected from outside waterworks, like rain and mist. Then suddenly there was wet sand, in lines and arcs and sprinkled little dots. I saw the ruffians pissing and laughing.

Laughing is allowed but pissing is definitely a desecration in these circumstances. There is a tree, mostly dead, somewhere in the forests north, up in their mountains, that a local village worships. They worship by pissing on it, so maybe these ruffians were from that village and they were just confused geographically. Everyone gets turned around after all. But it doesn’t matter. I was fired the next day and replaced by a giant crane fly named Smith.

The story continues HERE.