Tell Me a Story

I was up before the sun, but barely. June 2009, it was before five, because that was when my shift started. The sun poked up over the horizon and then went back to sleep. It was early.

My once red, now purple, 400,000 mile, 20 year old, 240 Volvo Dl wagon got up to a rough start. It was tired. Not much was left on it from the factory except the back half of the body. I turned the radio on. The DJ shouted through my one working speaker. I turned him back off. Too early for someone to shout their opinion at me. My driveway was a hill and I used the clutch to start it because I thought it was funny.

The sun rise was coming, the predawn gray the dominant color. The purple dawn would explode into orange and blue. But first the fuse had to run out. I sipped on coffee, enjoying the hot.

In the summer, sunrise happened earlier every day. The freeway is nearly devoid of life, in the morning twitter light.

There are only fifteen parking spots at the Propstra Aquatic Center, I’m not sure why. There’s plenty of room for more of a lot. But a red pick up backs in after I’ve been there for ten minutes. I always beat her. She manages to never be late, but never early. Kendall. She’s roughly my age. Long blonde hair, a runner for Battle Ground High School. More aloof than royalty. If you worked with her, you worked with her sisters too. Any shift I ever had with one of them, I worked with all of them.

“Morning.” I said. It was just warm enough that my breath didn’t fog. She only nodded in my direction texting someone.

The door chirped and unlocked.

After we had done our morning maintenance I was standing out on deck, watching the swimmers go back and forth. I could never swim like that. I was good enough to be a lifeguard but these guys would swim for an hour straight. I wiggled my toes on the damp cement. I wore shorts that were designed in the 80s and a red tank top. I spun the tube around in my hand, wrapping and unwrapping the strap around it. My feet made a constant pit-pat as I wandered back and forth.

The time melted into oblivion and soon everyone was gone except one gargantuan woman. Fat hung off of her bones, but barely. Per training though, I had to scan the entire pool every ten seconds. Since it was now empty, I looked at the pool for three seconds and the coming sunrise for seven. There was a wall of windows that looked out to McLoughlin Middle School’s track. Above the track was a grove silhouetted; sunrise light bathed the pool deck in warmth.

One of the windows in the wall was perfectly broken. If you put your hand on it, you wouldn’t be able to feel the fracture, but it was plain to the eye. My mind meandered. A high powered rifle might make such a precise shatter. Why would anyone be shooting into a pool. Zombies might. Zombies might shoot into a building. Because the government has paid to train all government employees. Zombie uprising and the lifeguards are government employees. Lifeguards…guarding lives. And so my first story started, without pen or pencil. “I got it.” Kendall nodded to me.

Relieved of duty, I went inside and the office and turned the same stupid DJ off and tried to write down my thoughts. The characters were clichéd, the story was about one-third original and a mash up of zombie flicks I had seen and read about, heavily influenced by The Zombie Survival Handbook.

For the remainder of the shift I went between the pit-pat of my feet on the ground and scratch-scritch of my pencil on paper.

The first eight pages describe the characters without any dialogue or action, in terrible detail. The only difference between people is their (young, fit, Greco-Roman gods and goddess) body shapes and hair color. I think for some of them I mentioned one distinguishing attribute. It’s almost impossible for me to read now.

After all was said and done (there was eventually action), two of my friends read all the way through the story. It was a labor of love.

I don’t know that I would be able to do that now.

But it was written out. Twelve thousand words and change on paper, and not for a professor or girl or money. I just wrote.