Metamorphosism

Standup

First he was tired, so tired he was afraid he would drive his car off the mountainside, then the electrical system went... no, that's too realistic... then all four tires simultaneously...

How do we get him here? Getting off the bus, the pool cleaner unloaded his gear and thought to himself with satisfaction that from the looks of this "resort" he had a few weeks work at least. Everything was covered in a foot of leaves, at least. The whole place smelled like when you drop your cell phone in the woods and have to rake around in the mulch with your hands until you find it again.

That'll do.

He went inside but no one was at the desk so he went into the dining room where a dozen zombies with blue rinses sat around listening to a stand-up comic. The comic stood on a small, round make-shift stage, with a drink in one hand and the microphone and a cigarette in the other.

He was telling an Irish joke that he had remanufactured from an old Jewish joke.

"So Mig Mick can't stand it anymore and he goes up to the local priest, see, and he says, Father, I can't stand it anymore, ye see."

The pool cleaner notices the dining room is so quiet that when someone drops a piece of silverware in the kitchen, you can tell from the sound it makes that it's a fork, and that the floor is tiled.

"What can't ye stand anymore, Mick," asks the priest.

"Me situation," Mick sez. "The old lady and I are barely on speakin' terms anymore and with the pets goin' mad and the one kid sick and the other one gone and us missin' her, we can't find our arses with both hands, so to speak, father."

The waitress, however, the pool cleaner notices, is about seventeen years old and surprisingly hot for this location.

"I'll tell ye what to do," the priest sez. "Get yer in-laws to move in with ye. Ye look skeptical, but give it a try."

"Aye, I'll do it if you say so, father," Mick sez, and he gives it a try. A week later he sees the priest again, who asks him how things are gong.

"Ah, father, it's hell on toast, pure hell. My mother-in-law keeps us awake all the night coughing and cooks for us, food guaranteed to keep you farting for the next 72 hours straight, no idea how she accomplishes that. My father-in-law is a sweet, grand fellow as long as you can ignore the stories he repeats incessantly. When I finally get into my deadend job and am sitting there questioning the sense of my existence and then surprisingly get an urgent task to execute, me wife calls and complains that she is unable to assemble the cardboard parcel box she bought at the store to send something urgent to our daughter who is away, and she manages to complain in such a way that implies that it's all my fault she can't fold a fecking cardboard box. Then in the evening when I sneak out of the office early to head home and care for the sick, the battery of my Dobló is dead, so empty the clock in the car has reset itself to zero, so empty it won't start even when a coworker gives me a jump from his Mercedes, so empty I has ta wait 90 minutes for the fellow from the auto club to come and give me a jump with cables so fat you could use them to ignite a fecking moon rocket. Then when I finally do get home, everyone's on me like Amazonian leeches on a tourist because they're so sick of each other. When I finally sit down at the table for some food, me wife comes in and sez, "ye'll have ta move, Mick, yer sittin' on my spot."

The priest laughed, a real cackle.

"What ought I ta do now, father?" Mick asked.

"Suffer, ye gobshite, that's what ye get fer not comin' ta mass on a regular basis," cackled the priest.

A few people actually laughed, but the pool cleaner was not among them. He went to the bar and ordered a gin tonic and when he had drunk it he ordered a second one when the waitress came to his table.

He thought, if he were this fictional Mick, what he would do is, he would get up from the table, after taking a deep breath or two to calm himself. He would go change his clothes to get a little distance from the situation. Then he would open a bottle of good white wine, the sauvignon blanc, say, that they'd been saving for a special occasion, and share that with everyone, Mick's inlaws, his wife. And eat his dinner. And then fold the box in fifteen seconds in front of his wife, just to wind her up.