Usually Fiction Inspiration Friday is where I create things or discuss topics that I hope to get you writing. As I’ve said many times, I don’t use writing prompts because the whole world is a prompt if you look at it. However, this week, I had to write from a prompt as an in-class exercise. I’m actually glad I had to because it was definitely an unusual one; in fact, it was about unusual jobs:
Think of three unusual jobs. These can be jobs you’ve had or ones you’d like to do. Then create a scene in which the character is doing that job.
That’s it. You can get writing now or you can keep reading and see what I came up with below.
I came up with five unusual jobs:
- The person who has to service the lav on the plane (not me, but I pity them every time I do a preflight walkaround)
- The person who puts those tar lines in pavement cracks (I did that as a summer job for the county parks one year long ago)
- A billboard painter (I can barely paint a wall, but it sounds fun)
- The person who used to empty pay phones (a long-vanished job I always wondered what it would be like to do and why, with all the pay phones around back then, I never actually saw anyone do)
- The one I chose to write about.
This job is decidedly not a normal one, but it is unfortunately a real one. It came from a long article I read while doing research for my first novel, and even though it’s been years since I read it, the images have stuck with me ever since. It’s not a complete story because I don’t have the mental fortitude required to write a whole one on this topic. It’s a rough, unpolished draft, so keep that in mind while reading it.
If senseless bloodshed is a trigger for you, I recommend not reading it at all.
***
The morning it happened, a mother wrote a note of encouragement or love and put it in with her young son’s peanut butter and jelly sandwich. “You’ll get an A on that math test!” or “Have a great day!” or something put there to encourage her picky son to eat it so that he’d see how much he’s loved, not just by the act of writing but through the act of feeding. It’s not a spoiler to say that he never saw it—that day was spoiled by something else.
A couple of days later, the items were cataloged, the floors marked with investigator tape, and the bookbags collected. I was new at the job, so when I came across the note, I read it. Not for evidence: the forensics team had already gleaned as much as it deemed necessary from the bag before passing on to us, but from basic human curiosity. It was a message that would be intercepted by me long after the bullets had changed its recipient from eight-year-old Danny to me and the rest of the crew: the school shooting cleanup specialists. That that is a specialty is a tragedy of its own, but law enforcement won’t do it. They consider it beneath their purview, so they hire civilians to do it. Civilians: we can’t be called military because there, the kids being shot up are usually at least eighteen years old, not eight.
I learned not to read. The note said too much already even while still folded. My job was to take what might rot, like food, and remove it so we could assemble the final effects of what once had been someone’s child and now was a corpse and give them back to the parents. Not all of them wanted them back.
I wouldn’t say there is an easy job here, but I don’t have the worst one. Someone else has to determine whether something is too bloodstained to be worth returning or if it gets written down with the horrifically-neutral determination “unsalvageable” and put in the bin for the incinerator. I can’t say who’s more unsalvageable: the thing in the bin or the one standing outside it. I don’t ask the question because I don’t want the answer.
And that’s not even the hardest job in this austere, impromptu palace of the dead. That unwanted honor goes to the jewelry cleaner. Bracelets, necklaces, rings don’t get thrown away if they’re covered in blood, they get cleaned. Someone has to get the blood off of them and back to the parents. My task is over in a few moments; those people have to take time and care, enough time to think about how those stains got there. I couldn’t do that job; I can barely do this one as it is.
If you read that, here’s a bonus to leave you in a less somber mood. If you can’t think of any unusual jobs, try these:
- Lion tamer
- Traveling worker at a summer fair company (a carnie)
- The person who creates all those little artifacts and props in movies that add atmosphere
- Museum art restorer
- The person who gives campus tours to prospective college students
Have fun!
I'd love to hear from you!