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El Lector
Cecilia fanned herself with the newspaper for a few seconds, tilting her head away so that the light breeze flowed over her taut neck and down into her cleavage. She felt the tickle of errant hairs as they danced against her shoulder blades before they settled against her lithe almond skin. Garcia was watching her intently, she could tell out of the corner of her eye. He would pretend to have been watching because of the movement of the paper, but she knew his eyes were caressing and undressing her slowly.
Putting the paper down again she slid the long white cotton skirt she wore up over here knees, and drew the hem all the way along the top of her right thigh, tucking it into the waist band. The material fell in swathes to her side and between her open legs and she extended her slender naked leg outwards, putting her foot onto the small wooden stool before her.
Picking out some filler tobacco she pinched it into a mass as thick as her own thumb and started to roll the binder leaf around it. As the youngest torcedora in the room Garcia had ensured that she was always sat in the front row where he would watch her from his chair as he read to the assembled women. Cecilia liked to close her eyes as she rolled the cigar along her thighs, listening to the deep tones of his voice as he read to her. With her eyes closed she could imagine that they were alone, and the feelings that pulsated through her as the tobacco was rolled back and forth always left her tingling.
She longed to discover what it would be like to sleep with a man, any man, but the factory owner, Sebastian de Rivera, insisted on perpetuating the myth that his cigars were genuinely rolled on the thighs of virgins. The entire staff save Cecilia were a gaggle of women mostly in their thirties and forties, none of whom had ever known the company of a man intimately and all had a severe addiction to smoking. Garcia was the owner's son, a strapping young man in his mid twenties who only agreed to work as a Lectore de Tabaqueres because of Cecilia.
Garcia faced a dilemma though because yesterday he had run out of books to read to the women. There were no new Zola, Cervantes, Verne, Hugo or Marx left to read and in desperation he had raided his mother's shelves. He reached for the first book as he watched Cecilia adding the wrapper leaf and smearing the tasteless vegetable gum that would secure the whole phallic symbol together before she added the branded ring to it.
"He descubierto una nueva autora" he announced to the women and opened the book "Jackie Collins, El mundo esta lleno de hombres casados"
Before the end of the day the factory was in flames, most of the women had scattered throughout the city and were now useless to Sebastian de Rivera and Garcia and Cecilia had eloped to Anguilla.
Dec.14.2006