(estimated reading time: 20 minutes)

Adult Frog

by

Blaine Arcade

A pool in the back is a suburban home’s most vestigial body part. If any sort of major stressor comes along, like the cancer double whammy that got Mom and Dad, one of the ways the house can fortify itself is by shutting down all resources going to the pool. Chlorine? Non-vital expense. Heating? Forget about it. Let the water pick its own temperature; it hardly needs a supervisor to follow the physics rulebook.

Lexi, the Ukrainian pool boy who stopped in once a month to scrub it and do the surrounding grass? Losing him hurt a little, he was hot, but it was just a sting, no actual damage to the property and thus the property owner, me, though I can’t speak to the current status of the paperwork.

Mom and Dad left it to me, the house, the pool, their car, and they even tried to have the medical debt ‘shove off’ from the rest of the estate on a sort of rhetorical raft of scavenged legalese. Anyway, their lawyer told me it didn’t work and they couldn’t leave me any of those savings, just the house, the car, and the pool. Continue reading →