FIELD OF POPPIES, CONCLUDED...

[READ THE POST BELOW, FIRST, PLEASE, IF YOU MAY. THANKS]

The gasman gazed down the dark stairwell, completely cognizant, on one level, of what the princess had told him. He was not to go down these stairs. On another, wholly untethered, level of his brain, he knew that he must go down these stairs. The answer to the unasked mystery lay at the bottom of the out-of-kilter stone steps.

He started down the stairwell and, as soon as he took his first step, the warm fuzzy feeling of floating deserted him and every step he took was like that of the mermaid of Anderssen lore. Every step was a razor blade in the bottom of his booted feet. His work boots did nothing to quell the psychic pain. He counted the steps as he descended into the gloom.

At step number sixty-six, he reached the bottom. Though he could not see his hand in front of his face, he sensed, he knew, that the forbidden door was before him. This door was the antithesis to the radiant welcoming door to the front of the castle. Whereas that door had virtually burst forth with warmth and good feelings, this door acted almost as a vacuum, sucking the life and love and vigor and verve from the gasman.

With trembling fingers, he pushed forward and the door swung open easily on well-oiled hinges.

After the gloom of the stairwell, his eyes took a moment to adjust to the red-orange glare of the stinking cavernous room. Although it could hardly be called a room. Defying all rules of perspective and space, the walls were a thousand miles away and the ceiling was a vague blur in the heavens. But, as the gasman saw, this was not heaven, this was hell.

Men, in all getup of bondage sweated and strained to move boulders that fell back into place and strove to stoke fires that roared when they approached. The gasman noticed, above all, the insectile whine of the laborers. They had lost the ability to speak; they were now simple pawns at the command of the scantily-clad women. The gasman noticed the princess and tried, unobtrusively, to reach her--to perhaps have her help him.

As he slunk along the wall, he was grabbed from behind, by an insanely-strong woman and bum-rushed to the princess's side. The princess looked down at the gasman with nary a glint of pity and her lips curled into an evil smile.

"I specifically forbade you to use those stairs, gasman. You disobeyed my order and now you will pay. With your soul."

As the gasman watched with horror, the princess's face began to melt, losing her beauty, transforming her, in mere moments, into one the unspeakables that had haunted the gasman in his dreams.

As he opened his mouth to shriek, a hand clambered from behind him, up his leg, and gripped, in a vise-grip, his manhood. Reins were slammed into his mouth and he fainted to the floor.

--THE END

Why did I write this story? Well, believe it or not, this was based on actual events. Okay, "based" is probably the wrong word. Let's just say that I was inspired by real-life events to write this rather grim fairy tale. And, yes, it all comes back to what I do for a living.

Last night at about six at night, I went to a woman's house to turn on her gas. She was extremely flirtatious and quite good-looking, too. She'd asked if I could light the pilots, too. I said sure and followed her into the kitchen, wherewithin she opened a closet door and said, they're here, right? "They" were the furnace and the water heater and, yes, they were there.

She bent down, in her tight black--accentuating--pants and took the bottom door off the furnace. No, I told her, that door needs to stay on, so that it presses against the switch that will allow electricity to flow to the automatic spark ignition.

She shrugged and said, "See? I'm a girl. I don't know any of this stuff!"

I answered, "Well, I'm a guy and I don't know a damn thing about fixing cars. It's all individual knowledge, not women knowing some things and men knowing other things."

She moved closer to me and I could smell her perfume. Our arms were almost touching. Damn, I thought, this could get interesting. It did. I got the furnace ostensibly going--it was an auto-ignition furnace; there wasn't anything I needed to do, and I told her to have a good night and I started towards the door.

She hugged me from behind, pressing her breasts against my back. That got a rise out of me...in a good way, though. I turned and smiled and I asked her for her number. She laughed and said sure and that she'd never done this before. I said, me either, Karen. We exchanged numbers, and I got paged for a damn gas leak. I told her that I has to go and she smiled and moved closer. "Gimme a hug, Adam," she said.

Why the hell not, I thought, so I moved in for a hug. We embraced and she told me that I was adorable and she moved her lips towards mine. God knows I wanted to, but something seemed pretty fucking wrong about kissing a customer, so I turned my head at the last minute and she ended up kissing my cheek. She reiterated that I was adorable and we set up maybe something for the next day. I walked to my van with a hard-on pressing against my jeans and praising God.

On the way to the leak, she called me on my cell and told me that her furnace had still not kicked on. I told her that it had been off for ten days and that the air needed to be worked out of the lines. As I drove to the leak, she filled me in on her greatest assests--her pencil-stub nipples and relayed to me that, besides the hair on her head, she was totally hairless. She asked me if that was a problem. Hell no, I said, as I drove with my dick. I told her I had a question for her. I asked her if she liked bald guys. She almost squealed. Oh my God, she said, I was just going to ask you that! I love bald guys...their smooth heads. I love to kiss their smooth heads.

Speaking of heads, I was thinking with the wrong one, apparently.

She called me twice today, saying that her furnace was out again. I repeated what I had said 32 times the night before: The bottom door has to be snug against the electrical shut-off button. I told her that when I came over later, I would take a look at it. But it's freezing here, she said. Then call the 800-number, I told her. Tell them that you have no gas coming to your furnace. I was actually trying to hook her up, seeing as how I knew that there was gas coming in and I pretty knew what the problem was. She called again later, saying that the furnace was out again. Did she want me to come over? I asked her, see if I could fix whatever ailed the furnace, reminding her, again, that I was not trained to repair furnaces. We went around the rosemary bush again (did I mention that she is as shaved as a baby seal?) and eventually I told her that I would call her at four, to set something up for tonight.

Meanwhile, I went and washed my car and vacuumed the inside and slathered Armor-All around the interior. On the way back to my apartment, I picked up a small box of Whitman's chocolates--just eight pieces, don't worry--and then I paced around my apartment until 4:00 came. (Yes, I'm a nervous loon.) For the first time in the three times that I had called her, the call went to voice-mail. I left a message saying, "Hi, Karen, this is Adam...uh, just give me a call when you can. Peace. Bye."

The ball was in her court.

I erased all the incoming and outcoming logs on my telephone and burned the two pieces of paper that had had her number written on them. Though I'm on the wagon, I didn't want the possibility of getting drunk one day down the line and drunk calling the fine upstanding woman who I met while on the job.

Maybe it was a mistake, I told myself. Maybe she was out doing grocery shopping or something like that. But I had told her 4:00, and she'd repeated 4:00.

At this point in time, as I type this comma, I'm thinking it a con job. How fucking low can you go? And I'm not talking about that dance where you kinda shuffle along on the tips of your feet under a pole.

How low can you possibly go?

--THE END END

Postscript--Yes, I had a feeling that it was too good to be true. But. I'll tell you this: If I ever get that address on Warwick Sreet again--and, yes, I remember the address as clear as day; I'm a loser--I'll head towards it and then, oops, somehow, it must have gotten deleted. Wow! The damndest things happen, sometimes, in this line of work! Oh well, she'll call back, and have to suffer through all the phonepad navigations. Wah-fucking-wah.

P.T. Barnum is reported to have once quipped, "A sucker is born every minute." I'll add to that, P.T., if I may: If a sucker is horny as hell and a pretty woman shows him some attention and talks all sexy-like, a sucker is born every five seconds. And that sucker goes home with blue-balls betwixt his legs.

Anyone want some chocolates?

*sigh*

Post-postscript--In her defense, though, she was good at what she did. She certainly had me going! :-)