The Lerious

            Beatrice Loude tossed her apron into the laundry cart and unsnapped her crossover chef’s jacket. She pulled her undershirt from her waistband and encouraged sultry kitchen air into the space between the fabric and her skin. She was drenched with sweat. Simply soaked.

            The dining hall air conditioning was broken again. Without exhaust fans, the kitchen would have been intolerable. The stale influx of outside air brought little relief. As she stepped out of the building, the intense late afternoon sun was in retreat beyond the shadows of the camp’s tree-lined perimeter. The heat and humidity took her breath away, like a steaming towel around your face at a day spa. 

            “Be proud, Bea Loude!” shouted an approaching voice. It was Leah Strange, her only friend at the upscale adult camp.

            “Make way for Loude and Strange,” the camp counselors teased when the inseparable pair walked between buildings or along the short path to the seasonal employees’ cabins.

            “Job of a lifetime, my ass,” said Bea I’m half delirious by closing. Can you believe the air is broken again?”

            “Oh no, I’m sorry,” said Leah. She worked along the beach, helping pampered guests learn stand-up-paddle or kayaking, Baby Boomers mostly, trying to recapture childhood glories.

            “At least I can get into the water. I mean, it’s kinda gross but it helps. I shower a lot.”

            “The Lerious,” Bea muttered under her breath.

            “What’d you say?” asked Leah.

            “Oh nothing, just a story my mom told me when I was little. She told me I was being delirious and I thought she said The Lerious. It became kind of a running gag in our family. Any time we misbehaved she said The Lerious was gonna get us.”

            “So where did The Lerious come from?” asked Leah.

To read the rest of this story and more than fifty others, please consider buying "Natural Selections," at Amazon.com.

😎

If you like fiction and you're in the mood for over 50 short stories, please consider buying "Natural Selections," at Amazon.com.

Or if you'd prefer seventy non-fiction stories inspired by a town in Illinois, please consider buying Park Ridge Memories also on Amazon. Click on the image below.

 

 

Me Two

            First, we need to address the pachyderm on the premises, the issue being that my given surname is Gilligan. Troy Gilligan. Yeah, Sherwood Schwartz pretty much set me up for a lifetime of teasing back in the early sixties with his silly sitcom and its iconic, dimwitted leading man. So I changed my name to Gill, Troy Gill. No more ribbing about three-hour tours.

            Toughen up, you say? Easy for you with your normal brain and thick skin. You see, my challenge is that I remember everything. Not just a lot; everything. That brings painful past events, even minor teasing, into the realm of my present experience. It’s not like photographic memory, summoning up pages of text like a mental PDF. My old stuff feels like current stuff, whether being badgered mercilessly about Skipper and Ginger or recalling the time I sneezed and a gob of green mucus landed with a humiliating splat front and center on the blouse of the school’s homecoming queen. And then she threw up.

            But that never happened to me. It happened to the owner of one subset of my memories. Now, don’t go thinking I’m schizophrenic. I don’t hear voices or think I’m Jesus. I have full recall of conversations, printed images and sensations that cross traditionally defined eidetic and photographic memory boundaries. Plus, the duration is all wrong. Unlike traditional mental disorders with fading dreamlike thoughts, my memories endure forever, vivid and intense. And I don’t know who they belong to.

To read the rest of this story and more than fifty others, please consider buying "Natural Selections," at Amazon.com.

😎

If you like fiction and you're in the mood for over 50 short stories, please consider buying "Natural Selections," at Amazon.com.

Or if you'd prefer seventy non-fiction stories inspired by a town in Illinois, please consider buying Park Ridge Memories also on Amazon. Click on the image below.