Sunday, December 2, 2012

Float

Just tweeted this story as my contribution to the Twitter Fiction Festival.  See @NikkiKallio.


There was a woman who filled her apartment with water. But no one noticed, and she kept trying to save everyone from drowning.
One day the landlord came by for her rent and while he was explaining what a problem it was that her rent was late, his lungs filled up with water.
She grabbed him under the arms and swam to the ceiling, where she’d cut a trapdoor to the apartment upstairs.
Somehow she managed to pull him up onto her neighbor’s living room carpet and squeeze the water out of his lungs, and when she did, he kept telling her why she must pay her rent on time, and that if she was late again, he’d evict her.
Then there was the time the maintenance man came in to change the batteries in her smoke alarm.
She found him floating unconscious in the hallway, the hammers and screwdrivers on his belt flaring out around him like a hardware tutu.
He spun gently in a kind of janitorial water ballet.
It was too hard to pull him up to the trapdoor so she dragged him out the front door and dumped him on the concrete walkway.
This time it took a passerby’s help to get him breathing again. The maintenance man thanked her and said he had seen angels.
From then on she put up warning signs because she couldn’t always be home to stop people from drowning.
But when her friends came to visit, they asked her what the signs were for.
When they started to gag she suggested they go outside and sit on the patio instead.

No comments: