Chaz was hot. He wasn’t 2026 hot, though. His was more that sort of 1956 beach movie hot with the blond-haired, blue-eyed Aryan sensibility favored during that era. He was buff and tan and wore the oddly fitting men’s short bathing suit trunks that were all straight lines as though his nether region had been redacted by a beige swatch of fabric. The redaction, as it were, did contain one oddly placed pocket that was also starkly rectangular. In that pocket, he kept a gold, heart-shaped locket and didn’t care one iota that this was cliché. The locket didn’t contain a picture of an old flame (in keeping with 1950s vernacular). And there was no secretly stored image of a clandestine boyfriend. No, in a weirdly Freudian twist, it was a picture of his mother nestled neatly into its chamber.

His mother had always been his greatest inspiration. She was an Olympic swimmer. She hadn’t technically ever competed in the Olympics, but she swam in an Olympic-sized pool at their community center. To Chaz, this qualified her as an Olympic swimmer. When he was quite young, he would go with her and watch in awe as she either chopped through the water with total abandon, or swam swiftly and gracefully, like an aqueous gazelle. His mother would invite young Chaz to jump in and join her. She would stand near the edge of the pool and hold out her arms, promising to catch him if he jumped. He waved her away, though, preferring to watch her. He always claimed it was because he didn’t wish to break that reverie.

So the years passed.

Then one day, his mother went into the ocean and disappeared. Just like that. Gone. It was then that Chaz knew he must do the unthinkable. He must become a lifeguard. So he used his dashing good looks and physique to charm his way into a job at a beach resort. As luck would have it, the two people in charge of hiring were shallow and empty-headed, which worked to Chaz’s advantage because he had no formal training to be a lifeguard. He couldn’t even swim. But he believed that if he stayed long enough in one spot on one beach, his mother would someday emerge from the water like a phoenix rising. Except without the fire and all that other pomp. And so he kept watch, his hand always placed gently on that pocket, knowing there was no danger that he would ever lose that locket to the sea as he had his mother. He was far too afraid of water to ever go near it.

PROMPT: Write about a lifeguard at a beach resort who’s afraid of water.