Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls Read Online Free PDF Page A

stared with confusion at his small, triangular goatee. But then he lifted his sleeve and displayed the patch with great pride, the way a fifth grader might show off a temporary tattoo of a cobra. Apparently it hurts if the patches get bumped, which he used as an excuse to not flex for me. As if I’d been looking forward to that.
    We wait until Leo is done throwing up then go get into our suits. Once inside, Leo’s arms, which previously looked like blanched string beans, now appear to be relatively the same size as Bill’s. This boosts his confidence.
    Guff and Leo solidify their union underwater. Instead of using the reach-claw we’ve been provided with, Guff places Leo on his shoulders and operates him like an extended limb. Bill keeps dropping his claw and cursing into his headset microphone. He is unable to complete his “mission” of using the claw to tighten a loose bolt.
    I take a moment and enjoy the secluded world we’ve entered, in addition to my new role as an asexual giant. It’s fun to be individually wrapped and surrounded by water on all sides. Just when I’m starting to feel like one of the guys, Bill lumbers over.
    “Wanna see my electric eel?”
    He places his fishbowl head against mine, and we clink like crystal glasses toasting.
    At lunch Guff devours all the complimentary sandwiches then asks for more, like some steroidal Oliver Twist from the lumber-and-fur orphanage. Leo ended up having to eat activated charcoal. When we were coming up from the water he puked in his suit, specifically inside his face helmet. It covered the entire lens and made it impossible to tell whether he’d gotten sick or his head had exploded. Bill claimed to have lost his appetite over this incident, but after desuiting I saw him walk straight to the catering table.
    The rest of the day it’s just Guff, Bill, and me. Leo has taken the afternoon off to recover. Guff keeps giving Bill this odd look out the corner of his eye, like he knows Bill is hiding a cookie in one of his pockets—he just can’t figure out which one.
    I still haven’t really thought about what I’m going up to the moon to do. I’m a little afraid of being known as space’s first whore, even though I don’t really feel like a whore. I never have. At least I’m not giving people root canals. At least I’m not putting makeup on the dead.
    As the day ends, the show’s executives give us a sneak peak at our real suits. By us, I mean whoever wins and myself. Each suit has a small portal; mine’s in the back and his is in the front. The man who’s explaining it to us wraps their ends around each other, like marching elephants clinging trunks to tails. Once they’re aligned, they open, pressurize, and retract to an acceptable length. This way he can enter me. On the moon.
    Because I’ll be in a suit and will look like a hulking male physicist from behind, they’ve outfitted the back of my helmet with a monitor. It’ll show footage of me, doing what we’ll be doing, only un-space-suited.
    “Any questions?” the scientist asks.
    Bill has one. “Can you like, kneel down and stuff?”
    I imagine Bill’s panting coming through my headset in stereo. It’s going to sound like he’s in boot camp fulfilling a midday order to dig a ten-foot latrine. The secret to having sex with people who make disgusting sounds is to out-moan them. It gets them there quicker, too, which is half the battle.
    A few days before the launch, the contestants are brought in to sample the eat-off product, which was partially designed by NASA. Because the food must be unable to break off and create airborne crumbs, the execs chose a type of hybrid sausage. It’s a gelatinous, partial-meat substance that won’t flake or fragment.
    “Could we make this peanut butterier?” Guff’s vote for a flavor infusion is denied.
    “It doesn’t smell like anything,” says Leo. This is true, but Leo says this carefully, as if he knows they’re about to tell him, It smells