Hope springs eternal

Finishing her shift on the trampoline with a lazy backward somersault, Hope Riley Rechard-Johanneson, 22, of Bridgeport, Connecticut, gave a high five to her replacement, Elaine Hope Verminelli before dismounting and heading for the showers. Walking in the manner of a duck in order to keep from pissing herself after so many hours spent bouncing around in the air, Ms. Rechard-Johanneson made it to the toilet just in time. “I normally remember to not drink water before a shift, but, today, it slipped my mind,” she said while a torrent of urine streamed into the porcelain bowl. “My employer is, after all, paying me or someone else with the name Hope to spring eternal; the girl who usually serves as my break-time replacement didn't show up today, so I had to tough it out.”

In addition to paying young ladies named Hope to spring eternally upon a trampoline positioned so that he can watch them jumping from his favorite sitting-chair, Naithen James Otelo, 75, a widower who claims to have made his fortune “selling knockoff designer luxury goods to dumb tourists,” also maintains a number of other folk wisdoms on his property. He pays different girls named Hope (the larger, more corpulent ones) to float around in his Olympic-sized swimming pool; he runs a stable of charlatans who are tasked with always trying to bullshit him, a bullshitter; he employs a team of balloonists to make sure a giant clock suspended from a helium-filled dirigible never touches the ground; he subsidizes his neighbors' lawn maintenance programs so that their grass is always more lush than his own; and he makes sure to tip those of his employees who attend to their tasks without undue and wasteful haste.

“As a way of paying for college, this sure beats stripping,” said Ms. Verminelli, 19, who is originally from Flagstaff, Arizona. “But five hours of non-stop bouncing on a trampoline four days a week is wreaking havoc on my equilibrium. Seriously, I awake from sleep due to nightmares I have in which everything is bouncing – people, roads, the sky, everything. At night, when the boss is sleeping, he provides us with headlamps so we can read books while we're springing, but, in the long run, it's still kind of unsettling. Again, though, it beats giving blowies at interstate rest-stops.” While watching two Hopes slap palms as part of their mandatory hand-off ritual, Mr. Otelo sighed contentedly. “I like my truisms to be right out there, bold and beautiful, the wisdom of the ages being acted out in my back yard. I find it comforting to know that, out on my racetrack, jockeys are waiting until the race is done to change horses, and that, down in the fields, the first birds to arrive each morning get first dibs on food.”

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