Flash Fiction Friday -- Pay Day in Flash Friday

It turns out that I wrote using 12/13/13 prompts that didn’t migrate to 12/20/13, so let's call this one a bonus.

Prompts: imagine, glasses, sleet

People are lazy. It’s just human nature. They’re petty, mean and lazy. That’s the first thing you learn in this kind of work.

And you shouldn’t be too proud. This work quickly cured a person of the belief that he was too good to stand outside in the rain, sleet or snow. That a person was somehow above rooting through another person’s trash. That a person had already seen every flavor of perversion or depravity that humans could dream up.

Oh no. In real life Rule 36 always applied. And it was all the sicker for seeing it live.

The funny thing was, though, that for as much truly horribly original shit as was out there, most people were rather pedestrian in their tastes. Everyone thought that he -- or she, for that matter -- was some sex crazed monster with unique appetites that only a select few could comprehend, much less tolerate.

There was an ice cream company out of Philadelphia that made a vanilla flavor and a vanilla bean. Most people easily fit into one of those two varieties. That made the work easy, predictable and sometimes even boring.

Gerry pushed his glasses back with his wrist and then moved the print from the bin with the developer in it to a neighboring bin with water in it. The image appeared black and pink because of the overhead safety light.

What’s black and white and red all over?

Gerry smiled to himself. He always thought of that stupid joke whenever he developed photos. He always did them in black and white. It added to the romance for the clients. Most of the photos were of rich bored husbands cheating with bimbos on their rich bored wives who, in turn, hired a private detective to follow hubby around while they, themselves, made time with gardeners or pool boys. There was something dramatic in slapping down the 8x11 inch evidence of an affair like a P.I. in a 40s era thriller. Color prints just didn’t have the same feel. Digital was for the gossip sites if the players were juicy enough.

As he moved the photo from the water to the stop bath, Gerry got his first hard look at the bimbo. On the job the subjects were just subjects. To get the photos was the job and to do it well, you couldn’t be distracted by the subject. There was plenty of time to analyze a subject’s attributes in the darkroom.

The lady was built like a brick shithouse. Gerry chuckled. His father used to say that all the time. Big ass. Big tits. Thick legs. Gerry bet the bimbo could bench press two hundred pounds easy. She was solid. Not fat. A fucking Amazon.

Gerry moved the print to a second bin with water in it and then to a bin with fixer. Then water. Hypo clear. And water again. He hung the print to dry and stepped out of the room to have a cigarette. The print seemed to turn out well, but he wanted to look it over in case the exposure needed adjusting.

Gerry brought the freshly dried print to an easel with a reading lamp mounted on its top edge. With a magnifying glass he surveyed the photo. The man was looking right at the camera. Perfect. You couldn’t get a better shot without posing the subject yourself. The lady?

Ha.

On closer inspection the lady was no lady. She had all the right parts in all the right places, but the parts weren’t factory direct. She was a man.

Imagine that.

The photo on the easel would likely be the photo for the papers and the wife, of course, would receive a lovely selection of black and whites, but the gossip site boys would get the good stuff because they would pay handsomely for it.

It seemed the Senator had a taste for cross-dressers.

New Prompts: order, rock, simple