When Father Gaspren found out he gave us indefinite bathroom duty and took away my phone for messing with “the occult” and “destruction of church property” so while we had to scrub poop smears and piss puddles, it was worth it.
On our first Doody Duty I asked Bert if I could have the bleach and she said, “I don’t know, bitch, can you?” but her eyes were in a way like when she looked at pizza that she got to eat by herself.
“I think I can, bitch, so hand it to me,” I said.
“In a minute, bitch, I’m finishing this seat.”
“Okay then, bitch, I’ll wait!”
It went on that way for a while and that night I had a prophetic dream (one of my strongest powers) that everyone’s true name was what they were known for plus “bitch.” Bert was Hard Driving Bitch and Father Gaspren was Priest Bitch or Daddy Bitch and so on. The only person without a true name was me. I didn’t know what kind of bitch I was. I woke up in a cold sweat and lay awake the rest of the night still smelling like bleach.
The underwater resort fuckos had the nerve to recruit us. Three of them came to Our Lady of Good Voyage in the middle of an afternoon while we were having movie night in the chapel (even though it was daytime we called it movie night; by actual night we had curfew; it was an old dystopian movie about a plucky band of sexy and oppressed teenagers using computer hacking and crossbows to overthrow an evil vice president who murdered the milquetoast devil-you-know president and started a global resource war over fresh water aquifers buried beneath the south pole; the sexy teens temporarily ally with cybernetically-enhanced penguins to defeat their common enemy; we all cheered for the heroes on the screen no matter how little any of us could muster the will to be the clean dishes we wanted to see in the world).
The fuckos brought their various propagandas about how their sub-marine pleasure palace or whatEVER needed more Service And Hospitality Associates and no contribution would go unpunished or some shit. They must have known we would be a variety pack of undesirables because they were the most diverse model minority trio of fuckos. One had an expensive salon version of a do-it-yourself haircut and tattoos on her face. She looked like she’d really turned her shit around with rehab or Jesus or lifestyle blogging. Another wore a truly outstanding impractical religious head thing with some elegant corporate couture. She gave me that icy vibe like she was ready to throw someone under the bus to get promoted, but like a literal bus. The main fucko burst into his pitch right over the best scene in the movie, in this sing-song lisp that is exactly like MY sing-song lisp except I also have a trashy shore town accent on top of it because I happen to be ACTUALLY FROM HERE unlike that TOURIST.
Father Gaspren told them, “Please, no soliciting” and they took it for a joke (I’ll give them that one because “Don’t come here to forcefully sell things” is kind of a hard line to defend when you’re the colonial proselytizer, oopsie doopsie). They tore on about how the ocean was totally habitable now. They’d take anyone who showed up at the marina in time for the morning ferry to the sea elevator. Everything you could need was there and there was plenty of work to do and also whales had once been land animals and had gone back to the water, so why not us?
The thing is, that shit was seductive. All of us listened. Gay Voice McFuckoman made conspicuous eye contact with Bert and she took one of the brochures so I stared him down and hoped he could hear me telepathing that he looked like a red puffy baked potato in a button-down. He glanced at me and I heard him thinking, “I might be gay but at least I’m not a fag like you,” and I thought right back, “You’re right, we are NOT the same, because you are EMPTY inside while I CARE about these people so at least I’m a CAREFAG while you’re just an ELITIST FAGGORATI PRICK!!!”
“You folks really should take your materials and get going,” Father Gaspren insisted. The fuckos laughed again. SO RUDE.
“Pardon us, Father,” they said. “I thought all were welcome in God’s house?”
So I grabbed a thurible and swung it around my head like a slingshot and got in all their faces and chased them out the front steps screaming, “YOU LEAVE GOD’S HOUSE ALONE!” but by the time I came back the movie was completely over. I HATE professionalism and professionals!!!
There was a storm moving in and the rain broke right before we got to our chores so I mostly stabbed at the dirt while water that smelled like shoe polish dribbled through the ceiling and onto the floors I’d just done. I could hear wind whistle through the seams of the building and the spooky little throats of the organ pipes. Nobody talked to each other and Father Gaspren sort of crept from room to room. Shit was over the top drama well before the hurricane sirens or klaxons or whatever started wailing all through town, but for once I was just not worried? Like this one time ever in my life I think I was something approaching comfortable. At bedtime I had this idea to tell Bert about how we might fix the drainage and better hold off the worst of the storm, but right before lights out she told me all flat and factual, “Be taking those people up on the gig.”
“It’s got to suck. It’s probably piecework by the half pennies.”
“Probably.”
“They don’t actually want to give you a job, you know. They want to get rid of you with a one-way ticket out of the way. I bet the chapel is gonna be a luxury condo. They took our homes and now they’re trying to buy us out of our right to stay here.”
Bert exhaled long and slow through her nose.
“Well, I ain’t from here, and where I’m from don’t exist anymore. Bottom of the sea’ll be about as nowhere as any place else.”
I wanted to say something about how this place wasn’t NOWHERE with all of us in it but she’d have told me to quit being corny and she’d have been right. Her attention bore into me like a piston and I didn’t want to lose it saying something dumb which for me would be saying anything at all and I still thought she might kill me at any moment for any reason and I think that’s why I was a LITTLE bit in love with her.
The next morning I woke up to all hell bursting against my one tiny window in my EMPTY room. I started walking around the place and it wasn’t just my room, either. They were ALL empty. When I started kind of yelling a bit maybe, Faster Gaspren came out from his twee little suite and confirmed that EVERYONE ELSE was gone to the bottom of the ocean with the fuckos, just like that! We were completely alone in the whole world, like, OH. OKAY.
Fucking SELLOUTS.
Guess those bitches will never have to worry about hurricanes or floods or ME ever again on the COMPLETE OPPOSITE SIDE OF THE WAVES. I flipped off the empty beds then opened the window and leaned out into storm and flipped off the whole town and the clouds, too.
“We should get going to some higher ground,” Father Gaspren said. “I don’t think Our Lady of Good Voyage is going to make it through without her people.” And he said it with this truly sad little voice like he was momentarily a regular person. “It reminds me of walking through the house I grew up in after my parents had died. Of course, that house is gone now, too. The whole Dead Horse Beach village is gone.”
I SCREAMED. Like, literally, “Ahhhhh!!!” and “Oh my God!!!” and “I’m from Dead Horse Beach too!!!” I was all, “Hey there, boy next door!!!” and we dished some REAL ancient gossip, I’m talking DEEP neighborhood lore, and made fun of how the developers called the area The Benthic Innovation Quarter now like it wasn’t tenements for a zillion years.