Captions Sunday!

Three excellent new captions (short stories really) from a new contributor, Dolores Azul. Enjoy!

It Took All Her Brains—To Drop Down 

Sylvia Morales had a big problem. Before they passed, her parents got to see Sylvia become a success in life: she dealt in real estate and the stock market (got to diversify after all) and became very wealthy—a multi-millionaire at age 28. 

But success was the last thing Sylvia really wanted. Her desire to drop down the social ladder was difficult, but not impossible for a resourceful woman like herself. First she set up a dummy corporation to purchase office buildings. None of the business tenants were kicked out; in fact, they were offered slightly BETTER terms to stay if they used her maid service for cleaning. Then she set up another corporation: “Jiffy-Spiffy Maids”, and hired a good manager to run it. 

Then, in a vacant apartment building she also bought, Sylvia looked up YouTube videos on how to houseclean “like a pro”. When she got good enough, she went to her manager to hire on at “Jiffy-Spiffy”, impersonating an illegal alien. By the time she sought work, Sylvia had put on enough pounds to be unrecognizable to the manager she hired but only met once! Looking too heavy to do the work, Sylvia begged the manager to let her clean one day—for free—to show she had what it takes... 

Living in the worst apartment in any of her buildings, Sylvia, now known as “Juanita”, cleans offices along with her fellow “Jiffy-Spiffies”. In the most exclusive office in the best building she owns, Juanita put all of her “Sylvia” I.D. into a time-lock safe she had installed there, and set the time for three years. She didn’t trust banks, as she figured there was some danger of bank closures from “The Great Reset” during her time as Juanita. The time-lock safe was better than a safe-deposit box—or so Juanita thought... 

Sylvia trusted her second-in-command to keep her enterprises going in her absence. She didn’t reckon with her selling that exclusive office building and buying an even better one—Sylvia, after all, gave her strict instructions to keep building assets until she heard from her again. With all her I.D. locked away from HER forever, her I.D. WAS safe! Too safe! 

With her job at Jiffy-Spiffy her only source of funds, with NO record of American citizenship, and unable to access her growing wealth, “Juanita” had no choice but to embrace her life as an uneducated housecleaner, cleaning offices in high-rise buildings SHE owned. After spending a full night crying and mourning for the life she used to have, the former Sylvia Morales set herself to live as an undocumented “dreg of society”, a fate she’d always wanted—and now was stuck with for the rest of her life.

Growing up, and into her college days, Doreen thought that poor people were “unclean.” 

Her beliefs were based on neither facts nor experience, having lived her life in elite neighborhoods, and gone all her life to exclusive schools. Her personal first contact with people of color in any way whatever came at college—in the dormitory caferteria. A young Latina, just her age, was working hard to cook and serve the “Dorm Food.” As the back of the kitchen was hot, the young woman was perspiring, and Doreen noticed it. 

She went ballistic. 

Livid that a “Greaser” was handling and “polluting” her food, Doreen demanded that the poor girl be sacked. Utterly unmindful of the uncomfortable scene she was making in the cafeteria while her fellow students merely wanted to eat in peace, her diatribes grew hotter, louder, and frankly more racist. The head of the cafeteria brought out a fully-boxed meal for Doreen, which she immediately rejected, and insisted she see with her own eyes that the cafeteria head dished up another one with her own hands. 

“Never one to hold a grudge,” Doreen nevertheless had a snippy comment or two for the rest of the quarter when eating at the cafeteria. When asked by her friend, majoring in Genetic Science, why she didn’t just eat somewhere else, Doreen replied that she “prepaid GOOD MONEY to eat there, just like every person in the dorms does!” and that she would be “damned if she had to eat anything that might be—tainted!” 

Early second quarter, the Genetic Science department had a treatment finally ready for experimentation on human subjects. Always wanting the latest thing, Doreen clamoured louder and longer than anyone to be included in the research! Breezily signing the waivers of responsibility, she expected to have all of her genetic shortcomings (there was a predisposition for gout in the family) erased, and even her “always stable emotional state” become even more serene! Best of all, she would not have to do a thing for two months, and would be guaranteed—by the university—to “ace” all of her finals! She would wake up even better than she was—if that was ‘possible!’ 

Doreen woke up with the head of the medical school, the head of the Genetic Science department, and the dean of the university around her bed, looking worried—but almost...smug! The experiment managed to erase the genetic predisposition for gout, but Doreen was completely changed—to a LATINA, a Latina from the same place in Mexico where her “nemesis” the cafeteria worker came from! But performing two changes in two months was...a mistake! The dean of the university solemnly told Doreen that she was STUCK in her very healthy, Latina body, for THE REST OF HER LIFE! As she signed all the waivers the university was exempt from prosecution, but the dean insisted that Doreen would be cared for, for the rest of her days. Ready to blast the flesh off of the dean’s face, Doreen found.....she.....COULDN’T! Any anger or rage she tried to act on immediately transmuted to impotent fuming, embarrassment, and humiliation! Her eyes wide open in shock, Doreen held her horrified face in her brown hands and hyperventilated until the doctors were forced to sedate her... 

Her old White upper-class body gone, her ability to express her intelligence gone, Doreen is now employed by the university—as a housekeeper. She cleans the same building where she used to stay as a student, but now she mostly cleans toilets! Intelligence tests showed Doreen’s I.Q. had fallen, from 128 to 85! In truth, her intelligence was just as high as it ever was, but, unable to EXPRESS it, the university goes with the best evidence they have, and treats her as if she is mildly-retarded. By contrast, the very kindly—and highly intelligent—cafeteria worker would be attending the university on scholarship next quarter! 

With over twenty public restrooms on campus to clean, Doreen, disowned by her family and renamed “Daniela” by her legal guardians at the university, discovered that she perspires just as much—if not more—than her (now) friend the cafeteria worker. Pining over what she’s lost, mopping tile floors, wiping down sink after sink, and scrubbing toilet bowl after toilet bowl every day, Daniela glistens with sweat—“greasier” and “slicker”—than the good friend she once accused ever does.

 

Even those who used to know Marcia Canwell as the trim and stylish Congresswoman from a wealthy district would find it nearly impossible to recognize her in the heavyset, simpering, bashful, and simple-minded Blue Collar woman she has become! 

It wasn’t just her plain scrubby hair, or missing eyebrows, or large pendulous breasts, or the round swelling belly completely covering her sex, or fat hips and butt, or thunder-thighs, or junk-food binging—unmistakable signs that she plunged herself into a White Trash lifestyle. The change was FAR deeper than that! 

Over the last three years—ever since she went on sabbatical from the Halls of Congress (just for a couple of months of “forbidden lifestyle,” she had thought back then), first as a waitress in a greasy spoon in a midwestern town where nobody knew her, then as a housecleaner in a maids-for-hire company—she gradually, but surely, assumed the dietary habits, cheap polyester clothes, mannerisms, long working hours at minimum wage, and grade-school speech patterns of her fellow service workers. She not only dressed like one of them, ate like one of them, put on eighty extra pounds like one of them, put her car in storage and rode the bus like one of them, and spoke like an uneducated elementary-school dropout—a deliberate choice she made to blend in with her new friends who used to make fun of her “snooty” speech—she was THINKING just like one as well! 

Then before she could get her car, her stylish clothes (which no longer fit her), and her credit cards out of storage, the bargain-basement storage facility she kept her things in got bought out by a large national chain—just as the maids company where she worked “temporarily” laid off everyone from COVID-19! By the time she had work again and had money to get her property back, the new management sold her car and clothes and burned her I.D.! 

When her meager savings ran out—with no fingerprints on file, and with no I.D. her assets as a Congresswoman effectively locked away—she moved in with some of the women she cleans houses with, and five of them share a tiny apartment. Sometimes, on her rounded knees, scrubbing the inside of a greasy oven, she remembers her old life as a politician with a six-figure income and five-figures per paid political speech. A part of her pines for her old, posh life, but she knows in her shameful heart-of-hearts that throwing away all of her privilege is what she always wanted.

 

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