Stress Management Using Tennis by Kris P. Kreme
Melanie Truss was a talent on the court, ready to go pro and be quite the success. A simple injury changed all that and these days she manages life and stress the same way… using tennis.
Coaching young adults she loves her job, takes it seriously, easily handles the students who don’t. Like the new waste management group taking over for the city, she handles taking out the trash, mostly in the form of guys who don’t take her seriously.
But something is making life trashier, changing her friends and students… and Melanie suspects it has everything to do with the new trash bins, the trucks picking them up.
Who are the ones managing the trash, and why would they be doing this?
Over 16,000 Words of Kreme!
Melanie Truss has always respected the game, whether it’s the game of life or the game of tennis. Life hasn’t made everything easy though, and yet she’s happy with her work as a tennis coach for young adults these days. Having tried the pro circuit competitively she was an amazing talent, who unfortunately suffered an amazingly unfortunate injury which ended her future success early. But she still has a talent and skill at the game, and more than enough edge to handle unruly students who come along, usually college guys who think a woman coach is no one to take seriously.
She’s dealt with guys before, and despite being in her late twenties Melanie has never married. She has largely given up on the idea of it. She’s also recently chosen to fully give up men, accepting that she just has a reluctance to let a man be involved in her life, particularly when that man inevitably expects her to be nothing short of a baby factory for family and nothing substantial.
No, basically Melanie Truss has always had the tendencies but in recent months accepted herself as lesbian, though even lesbian it isn’t like she’s actively involved or anything. The town just isn’t big enough to offer the best selections, having some reasonably nice spots like a gym she frequents to stay fit and a local neighborhood bar where she and her close group of friends get together for a drink a couple of times a week.
It’s funny, she supposes, for a small town to have a lot of stress, but Melanie has started to accept that once you reach a certain age, stress just happens no matter who you are or what your circumstances, and she’s fortunately good at burning off that stress with tennis. At least that was before a new stress seemed to happen, a strangely unnoticed stress that arrived around the same time as the new waste management group took over garbage pickup for the small city.
Is it her imagination or does everyone seem a little off the day after their new garbage bins arrive, even more so after their first garbage pickup from the fancy new trucks? At first it’s nothing obvious but something strange, like they just seem a bit careless, less themselves, maybe a bit trashier in how they act or respect themselves? And do the men, even her guy friends who hang out at the local bar with them once a week, seem ruder toward the girls, more dismissive, more possessive, somehow even condescending and insulting, making sexist jokes, getting more touchy feely?
Even in her weekly lessons, which do happen to take place on trash days, Melanie is starting to feel foggier, less cutthroat with the pompous college guy she trains, less bothered by public displays of affection from the girl always dropped off by her latest boy toy. Something seems a bit off, and a part of her is almost certain it started around the time that new waste management group literally rolled into town with their new trucks.
Will Melanie Truss or her best friends figure out that something is changing them, something every one of them has in common, yet none of them pays much attention to? Will her students improve at tennis, or will Melanie take on a whole new system of rewarding those students for improving on the court?
There’s something sinister happening in Melanie’s town, something beyond stressful, something that becomes downright smutty over time, and in the end she may have more to focus on than Stress Management Using Tennis.
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