![]() ![]() Man's gonna break his back doing that from sun-up til late at night."Ĭarnell snorted. "Like shoving 500-pound bales around that concrete floor all day like they were nothing. Whether it was exhaustion, undisguised lust or a combination of the two, Sari's self-awareness failed to engage as she stared at him while he toiled on the bale floor under the rosy glow of the overhead sodium vapor lights. "What? You ain't never seen a man working?" Carnell said when he saw Sari gawking at him. He worked long and hard hours to pay what the court said he owed, which amounted to more than half of his monthly take-home pay. The marriage lasted just long enough to spare the child the stigma of bastardy, and now Carnell was on the hook for just over $1,000 a month in child support to his ex. He dropped out of school and out of sight for a while but got his general equivalency diploma a year later. Carnell, two years older but just one grade ahead of Sari, had married a girl who found out she was pregnant with his child midway through his senior year. ![]() The two never hooked up - never even kissed - but had flirted with each other from time to time, starting in high school. Carnell's family had lived in Marshall County but moved just across the county line into DeSoto his senior year, but the Marshall school district never found out about it. She and Carnell had known each other for years, since she enrolled in West Marshall High School. Nickname notwithstanding, she could feel it dampening in her panties as she leered at Carnell. Miss Kitty was the pet name she gave her lady bits at her mother's suggestion years earlier and her mom heard her refer to the region as her "pussy." Good girls don't use that word, her mother told her. That boy could make Miss Kitty purr, Sari mused to herself as she watched Carnell's biceps bulge and flex like a coiled python beneath his sweaty, faded maroon Mississippi State Baseball T-shirt as he manhandled bale after bale onto the forklift. Strong men with powerful legs, arms and backs wrangled the bales off the belt, onto a forklift that would stack them neatly and efficiently so they could quickly be shipped out quickly just up the road to a plant in Memphis. Sari slumped into a chair on the deck a few feet from the conveyor belt that would carry the next bale of cleaned, compressed cotton fiber, separated from its hulls, seeds and foreign foliage matter, onto the storage area next to the shipping bay where they would be loaded onto flatbed trailers and trucked overnight to a cleaning, compressing and grading facility. She slung the drink, covered with a gray sheen of airborne cotton dust the mask kept her from inhaling but had settled in only a few minutes onto her coffee, onto the gravel below. "Shit," she muttered as she removed the face covering and goggles that occupational and safety regulations required her to wear inside the gin and the hair net she wore of her own accord. ![]() She had planned to step outside onto the gin's service deck, into the clean, crisp fall air, and gulp down the sweet, rich concoction she had made. But Sari was dragging and needed the caffein lift that this cup of java would give her to finish out her day sometime between 11 and midnight. Double shifts weren't uncommon in October in this northwesternmost town in Mississippi where the cotton harvest - and cotton ginning - were going full tilt. It was already nearly 10 o'clock at night and Sari had been on the job more than 16 hours. Yet by the time she got back, a disgusting film of cotton dust had settled onto the coffee that she had filled with sugar and powdered creamer. The Styrofoam cup half full of coffee from the commissary vending machine had only been on the duty desk for less than five minutes while Sari Fogarty made her rounds, inspecting the massive and mighty machines that ran the Gray Knight Gin just south of Walls, Mississippi. All characters presented in this narrative are over the age of 18. This is a work of fiction and any resemblance by any character or situation to any actual person or event is purely coincidental. ![]()
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