The Easiest Job in the World

Haunted by this month’s student loan statement, one recently unemployed Beatrice Bacchus decides to return to her alma mater, hoping to find an odd job to fix her financial problems.
There, she runs into a former professor: the charming and kind-hearted Frederik Ødegaard. In two uneventful seconds, the crush on him she’d laid to rest a year ago is given life again. Letting her guard down, Beatrice tells him her tale of woe.

When’s she’s finished blathering on, the charming and kind-hearted Frederick Ødegaard offers up a solution. He proposes Beatrice babysit his special needs son at their home in the forest just outside town. He’ll pay her well, he promises, and if she wants, he’ll hire her again, until she’s back on her feet.

Judgement impaired by too much of a good thing, she happily accepts Ødegaard’s offer. Hours later, after she’s armed herself with a knife and a handful of alibis, Beatrice sets out for the farmhouse. Several wrong turns later, she finally finds the place within the labyrinthine forest. It isn’t what she expected. The place looks run-down, and the crops that grow there are deformed, unrecognizable.

But Beatrice is a scavenger. She’s seen and been in far worse situations. So when she makes it to the porch and smells something rotted coming through the floorboards, she doesn’t think much of it. After all, Frederick Ødegaard is a charming and kind-hearted man. His worst is all her hormone-wracked body could hope for.

If only the same could be said for his son.

“The Easiest Job in the World” is both a standalone story and an integral part of the “Bones of the Earth” universe.

November 2015: Story has been rewritten. Previous owners contact author for update.