WeijiThis story first appeared as Story of the Month in The Writers Bloc, December 2014
Photograph by Jennifer McIntosh
Autumn.
The alarm is blaring electronic funk in the pre-dawn bedroom. Pete rolls over and fumbles it into silence. Sally doesn’t stir. In the early days of their marriage she’d woken with him, made him coffee while he showered.
He’s on the road by four-thirty. The car seat is cold, and the windscreen is fogged. Winter is coming, he thinks as he turns the radio on. The worst season for a pool cleaner, even one on the Gold Coast. The water of the Skyline Resort’s pools is frigid. Two hours of cleaning the floor grates and he needs to spend twenty minutes in the sauna to get his core temperature back up—not that the management knows he uses the sauna, and would fire him
