This is a work of fiction and any resemblance by any character or situation to any actual person or event is purely coincidental. All characters presented in this narrative are over the age of 18.

Harvest Moon

A Shared Longing

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. 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.

It was already nearly 10 o’clock at night and Sari had been on the job more than 16 hours. Double shifts weren’t uncommon in October in this northwesternmost town in Mississippi where the cotton harvest – and cotton ginning – were going full tilt. 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. 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.

“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 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.

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.

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. Right now, that man was Carnell Boyce.

Oh, yeah. 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.

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. Nickname notwithstanding, she could feel it dampening in her panties as she leered at Carnell.

She and Carnell had known each other for years, since she enrolled in West Marshall 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. The two never hooked up – never even kissed – but had flirted with each other from time to time, starting in high school. 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. He dropped out of school and out of sight for a while but got his general equivalency diploma a year later. 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 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.

“What? You ain’t never seen a man working?” Carnell said when he saw Sari gawking at him. 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.

“Not like that, I ain’t,” she replied.

“Like what?”

“Like shoving 500-pound bales around that concrete floor all day like they were nothing. Man’s gonna break his back doing that from sun-up til late at night.”

Carnell snorted. “Hell, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. Got a young-un who don’t live with me but the judge says I gotta to pay for. That’ll motivate you.”

Sari kept staring. Times like this made her crave a Marlboro Light that she would have kept in the breast pocket of her denim Grey Knight Gin shirt until she forced herself during the summer to give up smoking. Besides, lighting up on gin property anywhere near tons of flammable cotton was grounds for immediate firing. So she just kept staring.

“How old’s the young-un now?” Sari asked.

“Jason just turned four. I would show you pictures but … well,” he said, Rus Escort motioning to the next bale trundling toward him on the belt.

“He stay with his mama?”

“I get him on days off, weekends and the like. Take him fishin’, to his tee-ball games, to the McDonald’s over in Southaven so he can play in that little playground with the ball pit and I get him some ice cream when he’s all played out,” he said. “Trouble is … this time of year, ain’t many days off. It’s the cotton harvest.”

Sari nodded in agreement. “Yessir. I know that’s right.”

“Ain’t you got something to do here other than sit in that chair and stare at me?”

“Yeah. It’s about time for my next-to-last round of running numbers on the dryer, the stick machine, the extractor and the gin stand.” With that, she put her mask and goggles back in place, lifted her tired frame off the chair, grabbed her Microsoft Surface tablet on which she would record the machines’ metrics and trudged back inside to the constant hum of the massive machines.

As she walked away, Carnell looked on appreciatively at how her bottom filled out the otherwise baggy, androgynous khakis that were standard issue at Gray Knight for people with jobs like hers. Oh yeah, he thought to himself, I could do that girl some good.

“Carnell, I can feel you starin’ right at my ass,” she said, turning at the door to face him just before going back inside from the shipping bay.

“Hey, you checked me out first, Sari Fogarty!” He shook his head and chuckled. Oh yeah.

●●●

It was all Sari could do to keep both hands on her steering wheel and resist the temptation to shove one hand into her panties and rub one out as she drove the 20 miles east from the gin to her home in Byhalia with a yellowish harvest moon hanging low in the eastern sky. It had been a long dry spell for her when it came to physical intimacy.

Nearly 18 hours at the Grey Knight Gin had left Sari bone tired, sore and covered with cotton dust that clings hard to any living being. It tends to bond with the natural oils on the face, arms and any skin surface not protected by clothing and is harder than one would ever expect to wash away. Even with the hairnet, it insinuates itself deeply between hairs and down to the scalp over the long hours.

Sari spent nearly 30 minutes beneath the shower head she had installed just for the purpose of helping dislodge the cotton dust from every pore of her body. For good measure, she bought the nozzle with an attached hand-held wand that was also capable of emitting either a solid stream or a fast, pulsating blast of water that not only cleaned effectively, it also served as a massager on tight, sore muscles.

When Sari got home after flirting with Carnell Boyce, she found another use for it.

Sari leaned against the shower wall and trained the pulsating stream directly at Miss Kitty. Not that it had accumulated a layer of cotton dust, hidden as it was all day beneath khaki pants and cotton panties. It was just that she could not get Carnell’s tight abdomen, his broad shoulders and rippling muscles, his slim waist, long legs and his raw, all-man power out of her mind.

This won’t take long, she thought as the water blasted at a rate of 16 times per second against her clean-shaven cleft and the hood of her clit that was already protruding as she stripped and tossed her work clothes into the washing machine.

She was right. In less than two minutes with her clit under assault by the pulsating stream of water, her hips heaved as she squeezed her nipples with her free hand. She fought to suppress her orgasmic cries and avoid waking her parents who slept in the bedroom at the other end of the hallway in the neat, three-bedroom rancher.

Exhausted and sated for the moment, slumped down the fiberglass wall of the shower after she came until her bottom touched the shower floor and she caught her breath. She looked beyond her trim, still-girlish tummy and her pert tits – their nipples still swollen – at the blossoming, pink folds of Miss Kitty, gleaming with water and her own lubrication. When aroused, her entire vulva would swell and slicken with her secretions. Even Sari, who had never seen another horny woman’s junk, found it extraordinary.

“Girl, you have got to get yourself laid,” Sari muttered to herself as her pulse and respiration returned to normal.

Sari had done two years at Northwest Mississippi Community College in Senatobia after high school and planned to transfer for her final two years to the University of Mississippi to get her bachelor’s degree in education and become a teacher. The COVID-19 epidemic had disrupted those plans and forced her family to cannibalize some of the savings she would use to become only the second in her family, after her mother, Dolores, to earn a four-year college degree. Now that the economy was re-opening, Sincan Escort she felt the need to work alongside her parents to replenish what had been set aside for her tuition, books, room and board at Ole Miss.

She had a somewhat steady boyfriend and a moderately satisfying love life in junior college. Sari’s virginity disappeared at his apartment during the spring semester of her first year the day after her 19th birthday. Marlon Riggs was a perfunctory, somewhat clumsy lover, as 19-year-old boys usually are. She had to teach him the necessity of foreplay and taking his time for her to have a chance to climax, but he was prone to blowing his load fast, sometimes before he even penetrated Miss Kitty. So they reached an accommodation in which she orally stiffen his member for a second go-around in which she would take charge, riding him cowgirl-style, rocking and grinding herself and, occasionally, having an orgasm before he jizzed into another condom, immediately withdrew and soon fell asleep.

Marlon left Northwest after the fall semester of his second year to attend Delta State University, and Sari was not comfortable playing the field. She moved back into her parents’ home after finishing at Northwest just as the pandemic locked everything down.

So it had been a while – almost three years, in fact – since a man had been inside her. The lyrics to a song her granddad used to sing to her when she was very young came to mind and seemed apropos for this celibate, late-October, harvest moon night.

Shine on, shine on harvest moon up in the sky,

I ain’t had no lovin’ since January, February, June or July …

Sari toweled herself off and blew her curly, dark brown, shoulder-length hair dry in front of the mirror. She appraised her 23-year-old body. Her face with its freckles, slightly impish upturned nose and wide, toothy smile wasn’t that of a classic beauty but exuded a fun, wholesome and irresistible charm. Her firm tits weren’t huge but their prominent nipples commanded attention, particularly if she wore t-shirt or clingy sweater without a bra. Her waist was as slim as it had been her sophomore year in high school and her hips flared gracefully from it. The gap between her lean thighs showed off her shaven mons veneris, her puffy outer lips and prominent slit to maximum advantage. That and her shapely, tight ass could turn heads and stiffen dicks when she wore a swimsuit or Daisy Duke cut-off jeans. All of this on top of long, smooth, long and well-toned legs.

I’ve got what it takes, she thought as she turned and posed before the mirror. All I need is a plan. A plan to get Carnell Boyce into bed and between my legs.

By the time she put on her flannel pajamas, pulled up the sheets and down comforter in the room she intentionally kept chilly and turned out the light on her bedside table, possibilities were swirling through her imagination. She had to find one with some basis in reality. Her tired body gave up and sleep readily overtook her.

●●●

Whatever fantasy had played out in all its lurid explicitness in the theater of her subconsciousness overnight, it must have been good, but damned if her groggy mind could recall it after her smart phone alarm woke her at 5:15 in the morning.

Evidence of the dream was in the soaked crotch of her pajamas, wet with her juices. Her inner thighs were also sticky. Must have been one doozy of a wet dream – literally! – and she was guessing Carnell Boyce was the leading man. But … damn! She struggled to conjure just a thread of the dream.

She tossed her bottoms with the squishy inseam into the washing machine with a load of her dirty work clothes and turned it on before she ran a warm rag over Miss Kitty to at least dilute the musky remnants of her nocturnal emission and slipped into a fresh pair of khakis and another denim Grey Knight shirt. Her car was cruising west on her 20-minute drive toward the gin near Walls, Mississippi, before the sun began to brighten the eastern horizon.

“Siri, play ‘Road Tunes,'” she told her iPhone as her Ford Fusion pushed slightly over the 65 mph speed limit to make it to work for the 6 a.m. start of her shift. Siri complied.

Her playlist compiled specifically for driving was eclectic, ranging from Katy Perry’s “Firework,” one of her favorites, to Jay Z and Megan Thee Stallion to the contemporary country of Chris Stapleton and Miranda Lambert. She even had some mellow, classic 1970s rock in there as diverse as Rita Coolidge and Neil Young. But the first song up was Jackson Browne’s “Running on Empty.” It was apropos because she was. Her fuel gauge teetered on the deep red portion near “E” and she wagered she could make it to work.

She pulled into the employee parking lot just as her car began to sputter from her empty tank. It was a problem she would have to put a pin in to deal with later. Sıhhiye Escort She had to go tap her Grey Knight employee ID card against the radio frequency reader before 6 o’clock to avoid clocking in tardy and rousing the ire of her manager. A modern cotton gin is a complicated organism and its constituent organs had to be brought to life in a specific sequence to get everything running in-synch before 6:05 to avoid damaging equipment and losing time and thousands of dollars from every idle hour while awaiting costly repairs. By 6:07, all of the interconnected machinery was warmed up and the first run of the machines’ telemetric performance data checked out, allowing the first of hundreds of cylindrical modules of raw cotton straight from the fields to be fed into the gin’s hungry mouth.

Sari had finished her prescribed sequence of inspections to gather data from each interlinked machine she was assigned to monitor. Her data flowed wirelessly into the gin’s database so the nerds in the “clean room” in a windowless cinderblock building a good 50 feet from the rest of the gin could monitor everything as closely as possible to real time, detect malfunctions and watch for backups along the chain that could presage systemic trouble.

Most of those steps – and several jobs, likely including Sari’s – would be discontinued over the off-season when the Gray Knight was scheduled for an upgrade to a fully wireless monitoring system that would communicate fully through a local area network to the feed the clean room a continuous flow of data without the need of a human to walk a route and glean the data from each machine. The gin owners were also investing in an automated bale-stacking and loading dock system that likely would eliminate the seasonal need for Carnell and other bale wranglers on the bale deck. That didn’t bother either of them; neither planned work there for another autumn.

Sari waited for the coffee maker to finish brewing a fresh pot – the first of the day – when she heard someone enter the commissary behind her.

“Mornin’, sweet cheeks,” the man’s voice over her shoulder said. At first perturbed at the perceived objectification of her backside, she turned to see Carnell standing there with an empty 7-Eleven coffee cup and a big smile on his face. Her heart leapt to see him but she decided to retain an unconvincing scowl. Or at least try to. She folded her arms across her chest.

“Which cheeks are you referring to, Mr. Boyce?” she said in a tone far too light to be construed as genuine indignance.

“Both. I see beautiful cheeks whether you’re facing toward me or away from me,” he said with that boyish smirk that crumbled her façade of defiance.

She just smiled and rolled her eyes as she might at an impudent 6-year-old.

“Why don’t you fill your cup first. I’ve already made my first round of the day but those bales are about to start shooting out the ass end of this gin hot and heavy,” Sari said.

“See, I told you those cheeks were sweet,” he said, deftly replacing the coffee pot with his cup so he could fill up while the coffee was still dripping from the brew basket. Sari watched his quick, sure and rough hands, spilling not a drop of the hot, brown liquid. She inhaled and savored the fresh, soapy cleanness of him mingled with the invigorating aroma of fresh coffee. Sari sensed the lean, sinewy power beneath his t-shirt. She felt her core begin to warm before she yanked herself from her proto-erotic reverie. When his cup was filled, he deftly replaced the pot where his cup had been, again without a drop wasted, and did a quick 180-degree turn on his heels to leave, bringing him almost face-to-face with Sari, who had lost sight of how close she stood to him.

“Oops! Sorry. Almost spilled coffee down your shirt,” he said.

“My bad,” she said. “Be safe out there on the floor … sweet cheeks.”

He turned, arched his eyebrows and gave her a sidelong look of bemused admiration for a couple of seconds. And then he was gone.

It was a sunny day that seemed to drag. The cloudless, cobalt-blue sky and crisp autumn air tormented workers in the dusty, loud gin, beckoning them outside just to soak in the prettiest day of the fall. It wasn’t so bad on the shipping floor with its three open sides, allowing the cool, clean breeze to wash through. By sunset, the sky was a spectrum of celestial glory that ranged from a bright, yellowish orange just over the horizon to lavender, then violet and finally a deep indigo in the eastern sky.

Sari took her 6:15 p.m. break in the chair by the shipping floor where Carnell had been wrangling bales now for almost a dozen hours, stopping only 30 minutes for lunch. She sipped her fifth coffee of the day and watched him.

“Gotta be something more interesting on that smart phone of yours than watching me out here wrestling bales of cotton,” Carnell said as he expertly used power and leverage to maneuver another bale off the conveyor to a spot where the forklift could grab it and carry it to an assigned spot atop wooden pallets on the far wall where it would be fed into a truck from loading ports 2 and 3 overnight.

“I doubt it,” she said. “Besides, the show here is pretty entertaining, it’s live and it’s free.”