The Dead Janitors Club by Jeff Klima

the water at twenty-nine knots (roughly thirty-three miles per hour).
        Matt, being the intrepid captain manning the wheel, noticed that my large ass was weighing down the front of the patio boat and we were, in fact, starting to take on water. He attempted to slow down, but as our inexperienced collective was quick to learn, there isn't a "slow down" on a patio boat, only a "stop."
        The laws of thermodynamics being what they are, I of course continued at the present speed straight off the front of the ship and through the motherfucking air, arms still spread like some messianic jackass. I am a resilient swimmer. (Thankfully, my mother did not hold the same opinion about swim lessons that she held about guns.) So I was able to turn my folly into an efficient dive that, from a viewer's perspective, could almost have been considered graceful.
        Now, this is the part that sucks. Left to my own devices, I would have surfaced cleanly, swum back to the boat, had a good laugh about it all, and maybe capped my day off noshing on a delicious peanutbutter sandwich heaped with strawberry jam. Instead, I encountered that wholly unpredictable foil, bad luck.
        Matt, you see, was concerned that the now-slack boat might drift over me, and I would hit my head on the bottom and possibly drown. The road to hell is littered with good intentions, and eager to induce some good intent, Matt decided that the smartest course of action would be to drive the boat over me. I had disappeared beneath the surface, and he was hoping that I'd dived deep enough to avoid the undercarriage of the rented patio boat. I hadn't.
        I surfaced, eager to share a laugh at my expense with my two friends just as the shadow of darkness that was the patio boat began its pass over me. The whup-whup splashing sounds of the churning propeller blades were omnipresent in the air space afforded me by the sleek gray pontoons lifting the flat-bottom boat off the water.
        My screams lost to the roar of the engine, slicing toward me at 29 knots, I flailed in vain at the precision-smooth pontoon metal sides, my arms akimbo again, desperate. This time anything messianic didn't seem the least bit jackassed. I begged at the pontoons to let me crawl forward and escape what I could only register as imminent death .
        The propeller, part in the water, part out, was spinning too fast for me to make out the individual blades powering the craft that was encapsulating me and was now too close to write off as an escapable nightmare. I would be shredded and emerge as one of those comically red stains in the otherwise serene, blue lake water.
        With the same adrenaline coursing through my veins that allows mothers to lift cars off their endangered children, I pushed off from the bottom of the boat, praying to a God I didn't believe in that the effort would be enough to keep me submerged deep enough and long enough so that wicked steel propeller would pass over me and allow me to glimpse daylight again. It wasn't.
        My head resurfaced, popping up corklike directly to the left of the passing blades, their razor edges fanning at the tip of my nose with unholy menace. My arms followed my head to the surface, and in a moment too instantaneous to process, my left arm was swept into the twisting thrust of the propeller.
        A violent yank wrapped the length of my appendage around the propeller head and swept my beautiful arm up into the mechanical process. A second later, it spat me back out and left me in the boat's swirling wake. I was incredulous to be alive, but certain I was missing my left arm from the elbow down.
        And yet when my shoulder extended from the water, there was my arm, intact and aloft. Matt, of course, took my raised hand to be a gesture of thanks for quick thinking on his part and gamely waved back.
        A nice long slice ran the length of my arm, not deep enough to warrant immediate medical care but