Week Thirty-Four(June 15- June 20) Topic: Psycho Winner(s)tied: Sunny, Camerandi, Christy
Christy does not want her winning story up here on Short Story Galore.
Camerani does not want her winning story up here on Short Story Galore.
Nanny in Vegas
by Sunny
Why the hell did I ever become a nanny? Taking this position had to be the single dumbest thing I had ever done… well, at least the single dumbest thing I’d done in the last five years.
The plane ride to Vegas had been terrible. Mr. Vernig, Mrs. Vernig, Devan Virnig (their son and my charge) and I all had had first class seats. You might think was a good thing. It’s not. Not at all, first class seats are quite a bit larger than the regular ones so I couldn’t simply squish Devan up against the window and prevent him from escaping. He had repeatedly slipped out of the seats and run along the aisles or locked himself in the bathroom. Thankfully the Vernigs had had several to many drinks and were utterly oblivious to my complete lack of control over their six-year-old son.
Things didn’t pick up much after the plain landed. Devan had to be pulled from the luggage carousel three times and then bodily dragged away from the coffee shop’s iced cinnamon buns. I had thought that things might be better once we had gotten to the hotel and I could fence him out from the rest of humanity.
It turned out that the hotel wasn’t so great either. Mr. and Mrs. Vernig had a large and luxurious suit. Devan and I had a tiny room several floors below with two double beds, an adjoining bathroom, a TV and absolutely nothing else.
“So Devan, what do you want to do? Do you want to play a board game?” I asked, trying to be friendly and not sound like I was picturing strangling him.
“No. We lost most of the pieces on the plane,” he answered as he started to bounce on the bed.
That was true. I hoped that the flight attendant hadn’t find the games pieces in the ketchup dispenser until after we had left the plain. “Well, then let’s explore the room then,” I said, pulling him from the squeaking bed.
There wasn’t much exploring to do. A family of mice was living in the TV cabinet along someone’s old sock, the closet was empty and the bathroom hadn’t been cleaned. “How’s the view?” I asked Devan, hoping to find one good feature of the room.
“Icky,” he answered and moved aside slightly so I could see too. We were on the ground floor so it looked out into someone’s back yard, whoever owned the yard had some personal hygiene issues. The yard was fun of piles of junk several over-flowing garbage cans, I started gagging.
Glancing around some more I noted a number of wooden crosses pounded into ground, marking the resting places of Mittens, Spankie, Panda, Jumno, Bubba, Tony, Mia, Jones and Sparky.
Good God, our window looked out on a psycho animal killer’s hide out! “Alrighty, Devan, that’s enough of that! Just a view, let’s go watch TV now!” I said, hustling him back to the bed and closing the curtains.
It took almost an hour and six arguments later he found a channel he liked. I listened to Spongebob out of one ear and watched the shadowy figures walking in the yard outside the window.
* * *
At six-thirty we had room service bring us up some Mac and Cheese and continued to watch Spongebob and I tried to keep Devan from throwing toys at the TV during commercials.
Finally by eleven-thirty Devan had fallen asleep and was drooling on the pale green pillowcase.
I sighed in relief, as soon as the Virnigs got back from the casinos I was resigning!
More by Sunny:
http://www.goodreads.com/story/list/1814...More from this contest:
http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1572...