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

hunger. He has already taken in about two feet of sausage (who knows what percentage of that is plastic), and really can’t be too hungry anymore.
    Bill is hurting; it’s clear. I know a lot about the gag reflex. Throats are one-way lanes, up or down, and it’s my professional opinion that Bill’s throat has now switched to rising motion.
    Leo, skinny dark-horse candidate Leo, is surprising us all. He’s eating in snakelike motions, slithering his coil down like it’s one of his own organs that he coughed up on accident—there’s a place for it, and he knows where it goes, and he’s putting it there.
    In the last thirty seconds, Bill has to quit and strap on his puke sack. It Velcros to his face like a giant gray shoe. I watch with pleasure as his abdominal contortions propel him around the cabin.
    Guff has almost quit moving and resembles a gargantuan toy that needs to be rewound. Leo finishes ten seconds before the deadline. We declare him the winner, and as he and I get strapped into the craft that will take us down to the moon’s surface, he keeps saying, “I’ve never won anything before.”
    As we step out I feel like there’s a tree growing from my abdomen whose leaves weigh fifty pounds each. They keep falling off and floating down to my knees with a heavy thickness.
    I’m watching Leo attempt a bouncing sort of walk when the intercom on my helmet beeps. “We’re ready.” It’s one of the show’s executives on Earth; I can’t remember his name but he always wears funny ties. Funny in a bad way. Tiny cans of beer with angel wings.
    Something about hearing his voice amidst all the nothingness makes me realize I’m being watched. It’s a sensation that oddly has never occurred before in the past during any close-up, or even times when I had to squat over a toilet bowl that wasn’t a bowl at all but a giant camera. I feel my fake-smile muscles involuntarily flex.
    Leo gets behind me, and I give him an encouraging low-gravity pat on the arm. It takes a few moments for our suits’ portals to align. When they open, it sounds like something very important is leaking out. The noise is high-pitched and quick, like wind from the future.
    “Um…just a second,” says Leo.
    I tell him, “No rush; there isn’t a time limit,” although we’re breathing tanked oxygen and there certainly is. When he finally enters me, I’m staring at Earth, which looks like the circular door of some ancient tomb, like if we could just reach out and slide it aside, the answer to something very important would be revealed.
    There’s a hiccup of static and I can hear the execs talking: Why does this look so educational? and Should’ve gone with the body bubble . I moan their voices out.
    “Er… just a sec,” Leo says again.
    “Take your time,” I say, but I break from my sex-voice to say it.
    “Keep it hot,” the intercom reminds me.
    I feel fine but also very strange, looking at the world and its distance. I feel its weight in my stomach like a pregnancy, like an old meal. When I want to, I cover up the Earth and its oceans with my hand, and then even with the cameras it seems like no one can see me.

Z OOKEEPER
    I took a baby panda home from the zoo. Technically, I wasn’t supposed to. I decided to keep my job there, at least for a while, so as not to look suspicious.
    Dolores from reptiles almost got me.
    “Aren’t those panda droppings?” she asked, pointing to my hair.
    “I don’t think so,” I said. I put on a helmet. The panda and I were still working through bathroom and sleeping arrangements.
    I named her Lulu. Pandas really like bamboo. That’s not a myth.
    At the time I was living in a room of the Sleep-Eeze Inn. All my local calls were free, as was my cable. I put up a DO NOT DISTURB! sign but worried it might fall off, so I taped several others like it to the actual door.
    One night I came home from work with some chicken tenders. I figured the two of us could share them. I did not bring enough