The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

It only happened the one time. To this day, I’m still not even sure what ‘it’ was. But it happened, something happened, that much I know.

I was working for the county at the time, on one of the road crews, doing repair work on the back roads out beyond the east side of town.

It was miserable, thankless, work, performed in the depths of summer. (Most people save the word ‘depths’ for describing winter, I suppose, but not me. Not after that job.) Day after day, the enormous sun seemed nailed to the top of the cloudless sky, a sky that wasn’t remotely blue, but a sort of colorless white with a faint tinge around the edges, down near the horizon. We were doing the usual crap: widening, re-paving, fixing the old ditches and digging new ones, chopping back brush. It’s no wonder they used to have chain gangs do that sort of thing; no sane person would voluntarily agree to do it, especially when he saw just how thin the pay envelope was at the end of each week...

And, looking back on it now, from a calmer period in my life, I suppose none of us really were sane that summer. Maybe that’s why it happened. Maybe my brain, everyone’s brain, spent one too many days out under that Godawful sun, pouring in through the disintegrating ozone layer.

Or spent just enough days. I guess it depended on a person’s exact role in the events that followed.

The day it happened, we were working over a stretch of shoulder, getting it ready for asphalting. Backhoes, bulldozers, rumbling around and trying with only moderate success to force the dust and dirt to go where we wanted it to go.

I drew flagman duty, which is good, and bad. Good, in that you’re not down wallowing around the actual dust, and dodging large pieces of earth-moving equipment driven (aimed?) by people as crazy as you. Bad, in that 1) you get to stand out on the pavement under that unmoving sun, and feel your brains slowly cook inside your plastic safety helmet as you twist the two-sided sign back and forth, and try to keep synchronized with the other flagger down at the other end of the construction zone. (Later, in a rare fit of intelligence and good sense, the state legislature mandated the use of walkie-talkies on sites like the one that day, but it came along too late for us.) At least the guys operating the earth-moving gear get to stir up a little breeze, however full of dust and grit it may be.

It’s 2), however, that is the real killer. 2), as flagman, you get to deal directly with the cars, and with the cars’ drivers. I have to say, there aren’t many people living in the industrialized world who to see the more of the black underside of human nature than a flagman. Policemen, I suppose. People who work in the movie industry. We get people who decide to see how close they can come to hitting us. People who aren’t trying to deliberately kill us, but manage to almost run us down anyway. People who evidently never learned the meaning of the word ‘SLOW’ before the state in its infinite wisdom issued them a license to pilot a chunk of metal weighing thousands of pounds.

And somehow worst of all, even worse than the outright homicidal ones, there are the complainers. The people who have to stop tootling down the road at ten miles over the speed limit for just three or four minutes, and don’t like it. The glarers. The shooters of obscene gestures. Or the ones who actually roll down their windows and... Well... we’ll get to that in a moment.

I stood out on the road, flipping the sign. Time was oozing reluctantly towards lunch. The bloated sun had settled into its customary position, and was happily banging on the top of my helmet with what felt like a large mallet. Or maybe one of those sledgehammers people use to break up concrete when they’re too cheap to spring for a damn jackhammer. I hadn’t quite decided, even with the availability of hours of accumulated data. It was the hottest day yet, and we were all shuffling around like zombies. Even the equipment seemed to require a supreme effort to drag itself back and forth, spewing up clouds of dust around bellies of scraped and glinting steel. Beyond a two rows of sagging barbed wire fence, dead brown brush stretched away from both sides of the road, towards the equally brown hills beyond. Heat shimmered up from the blacktop in both directions, reducing the approaching cars to wavering phantasms. The only good thing about the situation was that the heat had finally driven away the regional supervisor, an officious little prick named Yullins.

It had driven part of me away, too. I had felt strange all day. As I said before, maybe my brain had finally been cooked one too many times, or I had drank one too many cans of luke-warm Coke. Or both. I felt slightly disconnected from my body, as if I was watching the world from somewhere over my own left shoulder. I did OK with the sign, and co-ordinating with the other flagman, that day a big, sorta dumb (OK, dumber...), guy named John Akeley, but it was like I was operating on auto-pilot, giving everything only the edges of my attention. The shimmers on the road seemed to be crawling towards me, sneaking a few inches closer whenever my back was turned. The brush was shimmering, too. The whole world seemed to throb, the pulse rising up my legs from the sticky asphalt, counter-pointing the sun’s hammering (malleting?) down from above.

The drivers had been especially bad that day, too. I suppose the heat was getting to everyone. I was bitching a moment ago about drivers, but I really should admit that most days, most people were usually at least halfway decent about it, waiting more-or-less patiently, chatting with me. I even had drivers pass by and toss me a can of cold Coke on a couple of occasions.

But not that day. The sun grinned its relentless, moronic, grin. The wind lay dead and twitching around our feet, but somehow the dust still flowed freely. Trucks rumbled by, liberating it further. Everyone was surly and bitchy, and yelling. Everyone wanted to get where they were going, now. My semi-disconnected brain picked up each of these little packets of floating hostility as they came wafting in, and added it to a growing pile of.. of.. anger, I guess. No, not anger. Focus. Purpose. I don’t quite know how you can have a ‘pile’ of such things, but there it was. Maybe a totally different kind of pile, a battery or reactor, like the one they say they built for atom bombs back in World War II. (Or still do, I suppose.) Something that... stored at any rate.

And as it stored, headed towards critical mass.

And finally, I suppose inevitably, the trigger arrived, the thing that started the chain reaction.

The car emerged out of the shimmer, which now seemed to have reached to about at the end of my nose, and growled to a reluctant stop, slick black tires gripping the cracked pavement like the claws of some large jungle cat. It was a low-slung, flowing, fiery, convertible. The top was down, of course. The occupant..

Under any other circumstances, I would have been following her around like a dog in heat, my tongue getting fried and ripped apart on the road’s surface. She was blonde. She was the Blonde, the Blonde in the Red Convertible, the archetype of the species, so to speak- long, silken hair, floating free behind her, rich pouting lips under a perfect nose, and beneath that, a ripe figure concealed only by an expensive-looking sleeveless top and a pair of cutoff jeans, the latter precisely fringed with short white threads. Her arms were tanned golden brown, and bare except for a slim golden watch strapped to the left wrist. Her hands held the black steering wheel in a light lover’s embrace. She was cool, and fresh, and free of sweat. A large cup, sweating gentle rivulets of ice water and sprouting a long straw out of its plastic lid, rested in the holder beside her seat. She had been tearing down the back-roads, her self-generated wind whipping that hair back and back again as she breezed from point A to point B, just two more points in a long, uninterrupted string of perfection and comfort and ease. All of this I saw from some distant mental mountain top, spread out clinically and coldly before me. She turned her head, and seemed to see me for the first time. No, I’m sure that it was for the first time. Somehow, the large white ‘STOP’ on the sign had registered in her brain, but the rest, including me, was just dirt background. Her gaze flickered over me and my dust-caked sign, workgloves, orange safety vest and jeans. The lenses of her mirrored sunglasses looked like the eyes of some exotic bug. Finally those lenses located, and came to rest upon, my face, up under the helmet. Her lips began to part. Even before the words came forth into the hot cloying air, I knew exactly what she was going to say.

“How long is this going to take? I’m in a hurry.”

Something snapped inside my head. It was a tangible, quite physical sensation, and made a noise like a carrot that has been broken in two. I’ve often thought that I may have actually at that moment had a stroke, or small aneurysm. But I never went to see a doctor about it, and I’m here to tell you about this, still reasonably in my right mind I think... so... anyway...

Something snapped. Instead of the fuzziness getting worse, however, just the opposite happened. I was back in my body for the first time that day, along with that sharp, icy cold clarity. The heat was gone, the world dipped in ice and snow, and I could see inside this woman. I couldn’t actually read her mind; I didn’t know what her name was, or where she came from, or where she was going, but I could see what she was. I could read every inch of her shallow, materialistic being. There was nothing there, just a shimmering surface, very much like the heat rising off the road.

And since there was nothing there, the rest was easy.

There were no other cars behind hers. I took a couple of steps closer, and she shifted her seat, not alarmed, but mildly surprised that the grimy creature before her was actually capable of walking erect. I pulled off my own cheap sunglasses, and let them drop, dangling by their frayed cord around my neck.

“Shut up.” I spoke the words down from my mountain-top, not just into her ears, but into her soul. Now, in out of that sun, away from that place forever, I couldn’t tell you how I did it to save my life. But I did.

She looked at me, the lenses black idiot-holes. Her lips parted, but no words came out. They closed again. Taking another couple of steps, I leaned over and reached my gloved hand ‘into’ the car, grabbed her sunglasses by the narrow bridge between the wide lenses, and pulled them off her face. She continued to stare at me, unmoving, her hands now holding the wheel in a much tighter grip.

Her eyes were blue.

Of course.

Feeling like I was pushing my limbs through liquid helium, I flipped the glasses away over the fence and into the scrub behind me, and stepped backwards until I was standing where I had been when she had arrived. Following me with her gaze, her expression was one of... horror, I suppose. Fascinated horror. Not a horror of physical violence, or fear of rape... Believe me, I’ve thought long and hard about that expression, and this is the best description that I have been able come up with: Her eyes were those of a six-year-old child, watching an immense thunderstorm rolling towards her as she stands in the living room of her home, safe behind the windows as the darkness and the lights gnaw their intertwined way across the sky like a cancer.

But, deeper inside, not safe. Knowing, as all humans do when confronted head-on with the natural world’s big time heavy hitters, that what was coming could wash over her, consume her, if it chose to do so, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

“Can you hear me?” My voice was flat.

“Yes, sir.” Her voice was very small.

I looked at the other members of the road crew, who were finally getting ready to break for lunch, maneuvering the equipment off the road and onto the shoulder. Through the clouds of dust, John gestured at me to send the damn fucking car through, and pack it in for now. It’s amazing how good you get at interpreting these little non-verbal nuances after a spell. I returned my gaze to the woman in the car. The power, whatever it was, whoever had sent it, thrummed and flowed within me. Blew out of me on an icy wind, and surrounded her.

“My friends and I are going to have lunch now. You’re going to get a case of beer for us to drink, and bring it back here. Good beer. There’s a little store, Zeke’s Place, about three miles further down the road. Get it there. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Go.” One-handed, I spun the sign around.

Her head swiveled forward, and the car leaped off down the road, dust billowing out behind it, quickly dwindling and then vanishing around the next bend in the road. I turned and walked towards the others, feeling the soles of my work-boots clump on the roadbed. I slid my glasses back on, feeling the worn plastic earpieces rub against my cracked skin. Feeling the last drops of sweat trickle down the back of my neck. The heat and texture of the metal signpole soaking through my glove as I carried it, lowered now. There was no arousal within me at what had just happened. What was going to happen. Everything was clinical and precise.

And cold.

I arrived with the others. The crew-chief, a short, bulky man named Withers (and didn’t he take a lot of ribbing about that) waved casually at me from the seat of the bulldozer and finished talking to someone: a person, the top of whose helmet was barely visible on the other side of the hulking machinery:

“Fisher? Anymore problems with that backhoe?”

A voice came back:

“No, apart from the fact that’s it’s a broken-down piece of shit.”

Withers grunted, and swung down from the seat, landing next to me with a grunt.

“McHugh. We’re gonna hunker down behind the cats over here and dig in. Care to join us?”

Usually some of us went down to Zeke’s, or some place like it, to pick up some marginally eatable grub and cold drinks, but the heat seemed to have sucked the life out of everyone. Or maybe somehow they already knew what was rolling toward them. In any event, nobody left.

“Sounds good.” My voice was cool, unflapped and unflappable. I was telling the truth. The vehicles would provide a little shade, and we’d be more or less hidden from passing cars on the road. This would be, I realized, a good thing. I abandoned the sign, leaning it up against something, and went on to my truck, which was parked with the rest of our personal vehicles further up the road. Fished out my rather wilted lunch, and returned to join the rest, who were staking out their patches of dust and hunkering, as per Withers’ comment. I knelt down as well, but left my lunchsack sitting on the ground between my legs. I slowly pulled off my gloves, and looked out across the scrub bushes, between the defeated strands of fence-wire.

“Just sorta takes yer fuckin’ breath away, don’t it?” I swiveled my own head towards John, who had made the comment through a mouthful of salami sandwich. He saw my gaze and elucidated. “This wonderful view, I mean.”

“Yes, I suppose it does.” Like the woman before him, I studied John’s... soul, I guess. Parts of it flickered and fizzed thinly, but compared to Miss Blonde, it was like looking down through fathoms and fathoms of clear tropic ocean, deep water that teemed with vibrant, if not terribly sophisticated, life.

“You.. you feelin’ OK, Bill?” John looked at me askance. I wondered what he would do if I told him to shut up.

And I realized he’d probably just punch me out. To repeat my performance of a moment ago, I’d have to drain that ocean dry, and I didn’t have a big enough pump.

“Yeah, I’m fine. Just feeling a little stirfried.”

John snorted. “I hear you. Man, it’s fuckin’ bad today.” He squinted skyward. “Don’t that bastard sun ever move?”

“Not while you’re staring at it, it won’t.” This comment came from Carl Johanson, a grizzled, stringy veteran of the county’s endless highway wars. I always wondered why he wasn’t the crew chief; he had at least fifteen years seniority on Withers. But I never had the nerve to ask, and neither did anyone else, as far as I know. Today, as always, a smouldering cigarette dangled at one corner of his whiskered mouth. His dark, colorless eyes almost disappeared into a sea of wrinkles. With my new-found vision, I went deeper. His soul loomed up like a tangled forest, row after row of mighty intertwined trees that could stand up to an army of bulldozers, and shot through with a brilliant light that was almost painful to watch. But like John’s ‘shallow’ places, pieces of it were weak and flimsy. Rotten. The answer to my question must have been in one of those patches...

I tore my eyes away, abruptly not wanting to probe any more people I knew. And wondering what I would see if I looked in the mirror. Where were my patches of weakness? My new-found voice of clarity spoke: every human being has them, some bigger than others. Much bigger.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” For a moment, I thought John had read my thoughts. I wouldn’t have been surprised.

“It means a damn watched pot never damn boils. You keep looking at that sun, Johnny Boy, and we’ll never see another sunset.”

“That’s the fucking stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” Nearby, Tim Driscoll laughed nervously. Everything Tim did, he did nervously. The poor kid must have been about three-quarters Siamese cat. He was certainly skinny enough to be; if it weren’t for his Adam’s apple sticking out like it did, he could just about disappear altogether if he turned sideways.

I tuned out the specific words that followed, listening but not listening. Opened my lunchsack, and extracted an item, more or less at random, even remembered to peel off the wrapper before biting down and slowly chewing. The conversation, having quickly picked apart the subject of the weather, moved onto other perennial favorites: sports, (the news was generally bad that summer), politics (generally worse) and TV programs. (It was summer. It was America. Guess for yourself.) I continued to listen and not listen. Listening for something which I finally heard coming back up the road: the convertible. It screamed louder and louder. The vehicle’s engine was powerful and well-tuned, but still came out sounding like a wounded thing as it approached.

Everyone suddenly fell silent, and the red streak burst into view, swinging widely on the road and pulling to a neat stop in back of the parked machinery.

“Say, ain’t that the last car that...” John trailed off as the car’s door popped open, and the driver rose jerkily out of the seat. We all watched her from a frozen tableau. She bent over in a motion that was an exaggerated twitch, and picked up a silver-and-black cardboard carton from the passenger seat. Still moving like a inexpertly-controlled marionette, she came towards us, her thin-strapped sandals kicking up clouds of dust. Her hair was in disarray now, hanging down over one staring eye. Everyone stared silently at her, different emotions creeping across each face: mild interest from Carl and Fisher, open lust from most of the others, fear from Driscoll. She jerked to a stop amidst us, and set the carton down on the ground. There was a long motionless, dust-filled, silence, and then Withers spoke up, cautiously:

“Can... we help you, ma’am?”

The blonde woman jerked around, and looked at him. Spoke in the same little-girl voice she had used with me before.

“I brought you all some beer. Sir.”

“Oh.” Withers looked around the circle of faces, perhaps seeking some help. None was forthcoming. I said nothing, suddenly feeling that control of the situation had passed out of my control, like I was standing at the top of a mountain, watching the snowball I had casually dropped picking up mass and heading towards avalanche status with the speed of an express train. “Well... um... you... er... may as well pass it out, then... I guess?”

Instantly, she twitched over, her hair spilling down over her face. She inserted both hands into the carrying hole, and ripped violently. Tim gave a little jump on the concrete block on which he was perched. She fished out a double-handful of cans, and snapped herself upright. Began working her way around the circle of bodies, handing each person a can. Everyone stared, but took one without comment, until she came to Tim. He looked at the offered can like he’d never seen one before in his life. Finally he spoke, his voice querulous:

“But... but... it’s against regulations to drink on the site..”

One of the other members of the crew, a guy named Harris, laughed, a trifle hysterically. Fisher, perched on the bulldozer’s tread, gave a delicate snort.

“Son?”

Tim turned to look at Carl, who had already popped open his can and pulled off a long swallow.

“Wha... what?”

“Drink the damn beer.” He took another drink, and grinned, the nicotine stains on his teeth bringing to mind racist graffiti scrawled on the side of some sturdy, imposing, monument.

Looking like a man trapped in some incomprehensible dream, Tim took the can in one trembling hand.

The blonde completed the circuit, giving me the last can. She stared at me for a long moment, then turned, was turned, and walked back to her post the center of the group, not looking at anyone or anything in particular. I opened the can and took a slug. It tasted good, but, even though it had clearly just come from one of Zeke’s refrigerated cases, it was oddly warm. Like my body temperture had dropped ten degrees.

“Now what?” Carl again, studying the woman with a strange expression that even then, I couldn’t quite identify.

“I don’t know, sir.” Carl continued his study for a moment, then glanced at the oblivious Tim, and then at Harris, who returned the look. Harris and Carl used to hit the town together, and I guess they were friends of a sort, at least as close as Carl ever got to deigning to have a friend. Carl raised his scraggly eyebrows, and Harris nodded.

“Well, missy. You’re a pretty good waitress, but let’s see how good you are at the entertainment part of this particular situation.”

“I don’t understand, sir.” Her eyes were very wide.

“Yes you do. Show us what you’ve got.”

She shuddered for a moment, then began slowly gyrate her body, her eyes sliding half-closed, her hands beginning to slide as well, palms moving across her body, pink-tipped fingers splayed outward. Her tongue slipped slowly out of her mouth, and ran around her soft unchapped lips. Fingers still spread apart as much as possible, her hands danced up to the buttons on the front of her sleeveless blouse. The buttons began to pop free, one at a time. She turned in a slow circle as she did this, looking at each person in the circle now, looking for something. We all stared back, some (Carl and Fisher again) munching matter-of-factly on their sandwiches. The last button came free, and her blouse seemed almost to float off her body, a large dying butterfly, twisting to the ground in the breezeless air.

She was actually becoming aroused now. Before, she had been acting, doing what she had been told, doing her assigned task. But now, her eyes began to smoulder, and her nipples pushed out against her satiny bra. Again she made the circle, looking into each face as she slithered slowly out of her jeans. She was looking for something now, looking with increasing urgency. Finally, unsurprisingly, it was Carl who spoke up again, smiling.

“It’s Tim you want, little lady.”

“Yeah.” Harris laughed again, this time with more assurance.

Instantly she spun towards Tim, who stared up at her with wide, unblinking eyes. Now, it seemed to be him that was under some kind of spell. The blonde’s gaze suddenly became distinctly predatory, and she started slinking towards him, undoing and discarding her bra as she walked. Her pert breasts were flawless.

She slid into his lap, and leaned forward, her tangled hair obscuring both of their faces. Whatever she did, exactly, caused an immediate reaction; both of Tim’s hands waved vaguely in the air. One still clutched the beer can, the other dribbled sandwich remnants, peanut butter and jelly and bits of bread oozing between his grimy fingers. Then that hand opened, and came to rest on her back, smearing the goo across her perfect skin. Still doing something very nice to his face, she rose slightly and began working her panties down her legs, somehow removing them intact without ever fully getting off his lap. I was impressed.

Naked now except for the sandals and the watch, the blonde went to work on Tim’s jeans zipper. Their heads remained linked together, moving and rutting against one another, along with certain other portions of their anatomy. It was a bit of a struggle for her to get through the layers of protection; you don’t exactly leave your manhood flapping around loose on a job like that. Finally, though, the zipper was undone, the belt unlatched, the engorged target popping into view. For such a skinny little guy, Tim was surprisingly well endowed. Or so it seemed; I didn’t get much of a chance to see. The instant it was available, the blonde was setting herself down onto it, taking into her warmth, the only warmth that anyone would possibly welcome on a day like that day. They broke off kissing, or whatever close variation thereof it actually was, and she began to ride slowly up and down, up and down, her hands resting now on his shoulders. Tim continued to spread his sandwich around, still holding the beer can with his other hand. He stared at her breasts.

I turned away, suddenly embarrassed, and looked at the rest of the crew, one at a time. I could feel the power in me beginning to melt away. Most of the others, Harris, Withers, John, were staring at the display before them with open, grinning, lust. But not Carl. He watched the scene with... satisfaction? A thin smile on his lips. His cigarette still in place, cocked now at a jaunty angle. Maybe he understood, even better than me, what had really happened. After all, he had been out under that sun for a lot longer than I had, was still out there when I finally came to my senses a few months later and quit. Who knows what it had told him, in between the blows of the sledgehammer (yes, definitely a sledgehammer...) Maybe this sort of thing had happened before. Maybe he had caused it to happen...

But then my eyes fell on the last member of the crew, and the fall off my high mental plateau accelerated. My thoughts about Carl vanished in a flickering haze, and whatever it was that had snapped in my brain began to slide back into place, repair itself. Or maybe just scab over, like a badly-set bone.

Fisher. Olivia Fisher. How could I have forgotten about Olivia? It was like something had deliberately edited most of her presence from my mind. She still sat on the tread of the bulldozer, her clunky boots dangling, watching Tim and blonde woman’s display. My stomach fell somewhere down in the vicinity of my shoes. Olivia, who had never driven a red convertible in her life, who cussed and spit and got filthy-dirty right along with the rest of us. Short, brown-haired Olivia, who had a large mole on the back of her freckled neck, and somewhere had learned how to tap-dance, and had a stupid pet ferret she had named ‘Ulysses’. And lived in a trailer somewhere down south of town. She was watching as intently as the rest, but not with any great show of emotion. One of her eyebrows was raised as she sipped at her beer, watching. She had the expression of a woman who was methodically running down a long mental checklist, neatly filling in each ‘yes’ or ‘no’ box as she did so. Once again, I pulled off my sunglasses, staring at her while the rest continued to watch the blonde woman’s slow but feverish gyrations in Tim’s lap, on Tim’s penis. My stomach began to rise back into position, but something else started to take up the slack. My can tumbled from my hand, forgotten.

Unlike the piece of luscious tail that was currently performing for our, or at least Tim’s, amusement, Olivia.. Olivia stirred something in me. My vision was fading back to normal, the world becoming hot and dim and dirty once more, but Olivia’s soul still glimmered out around the edges. What little I saw made me bitterly regret that had not looked at her when I had had the chance. But I took what I could now, and felt the stirring grow stronger.

Abruptly, the object of my scrutiny looked over at me, and raised both eyebrows. Again, unlike the blonde woman, I could read her thoughts, as clearly as if they were printed across her forehead in black letters six inches high:

-You’re responsible for this, aren’t you? All of it.—

I made a vague, outward-palms gesture, my hands hanging at my waist.

-Yes. No. Maybe. I thought so, but now... I don’t know.—

Olivia looked at the naked, sweaty, Miss Convertible, and then back at me. She lowered her head ever so slightly, and looked at me from under her brows and the rim of her safety helmet.

And smiled.

-I could do it better, if I wanted to. All of it. I could out-slut this piece of fluff blindfolded, with one hand tied behind my back. And you’d like that, eh, Bill?—

I suddenly had trouble breathing. The world started throbbing again, but it was something very different this time, and much more recognizable. I turned to my... captive... and spoke in a choking voice:

“That’s enough.”

She didn’t stop her motions for moment, but finally she slid to a stop, and looked over her bare shoulder at me with semi-glazed eyes, still panting in her arousal.

“You may as well cum. You earned it, I suppose.”

She threw back her head, her hair rippling, and jammed her body down one last time. She screamed as the orgasm took her. Screamed so that birds took off from the scrub, dusty specks soaring away.

Tim jerked sharply two or three times, like someone had poked him repeatedly with a cattle prod, and looked up at the sky as well, but in silence. His helmet fell off, and rolled in the dirt. Carl nodded, and took his last bite of sandwich. The sound dropped away, and she brought her head upright once again. Slid off of Tim, in more ways than one, and regained her feet.

“Go on. Get out of here. Get dressed, and go on to wherever it is you were going. Don’t come back.”

Again, for a long moment, I thought she wouldn’t go, that she would start in on a very different sort of scream, and bring the police and jail and the unemployment line down around all of us. I could feel the last edges of the moment, the power, dribbling away.

But she did it, picking up her scattered clothes and walking back to her car, somehow slipping them on as she walked. The rest of the audience began to stir, as if coming out of a dream. Tim looked down at the unopened beer in his hand. He popped it open with his sandwich-stained hand, and drank off a long, shaky, slug, his throat rippling. Withers stood up, clapping his hands together briskly.

“All right people. Fun’s over. Back to work. Driscoll, zip up your goddamn pants, gather up all of those cans and ditch them someplace. It would be just like that fat SOB Yullins to finally show up now and find them. The rest of you, back to work.” He pointed at me. “McHugh. You run the backhoe for the rest of the day. We really don’t need any more interruptions like this.” He turned away before I could even nod. He was walking with an odd, stiff gait.

I walked over to where Olivia was methodically gathering up her lunch remains. Stumbled over, would be more accurate; Withers wasn’t the only one to having trouble walking. She stopped what she was doing, and watched the red car start up, and go peeling off the shoulder, back on the road, and out of our lives.

I’ve never seen that car or its driver since.

None of the others, except Tim and possibly Carl, seemed to really remember it, treating it like a fever dream, pleasant, but quickly fading away. An erotic daydream brought on by spending too much time out in the merciless sun. I might have come to think the same as well, before too long.

Except for Olivia. As she turned back towards me, walked towards me, I could see that she remembered it all. All of it.

Out of the corner of my eye, for a brief moment, I saw Carl.

He was grinning.

That night, the heat finally broke in a most emphatic way. Olivia and I lay together in her bed, her sheets still tangled around us, and listened to the rain pour and the thunder crash, and we talked about it. Turned it around and around in our minds. Trying to understand.

Well, in between the times we were adding our own relatively puny contribution to the storm’s fury.

She had not exaggerated her prowess, and I think I did pretty well myself.

We sometimes occasionally discuss it still, as we lay together in a different, much nicer, bed, waiting for the kids to wake up and come bounding into our bedroom, bringing with them their little packets of joy and enthusiasm and love, coming to energize our piles.

We lie there, and wonder about what happened. If I did it, or Carl did it, somehow, or we all did it, baking our brains under that sun. Wondering what the blonde woman’s name was. Wondering what happened to her. Wondering if she had Tim Driscoll’s baby. I sincerely hope not, since he’s married now as well, and we got a letter the other day saying that he and Julie are expecting what everyone thinks is his first.

In the end, it was Olivia who convinced me finally to write all of this down, and spread it out into the world. She wants to know. We want to know.

Are you out there, Miss Convertible?

Do you know?

Do you remember?

Are you real?