Tami Smithers, Grounds Crew Assistant

As they went down the dusty hall, strangely cold even though the day was warm, Winant said, “This building has been a pain in the ass almost since the day it was built. One big problem is the boiler. It’s an old model and we have to clean it out every summer, but this year it got so clogged we had to shut if off early. That’s why the building’s closed.” They went into a large elevator, obviously designed to carry big machinery, and then descended two floors, into the “lower basement”. The big doors opened slowly and the naked girl found herself stepping over tools and debris strewn on a rough concrete floor in what was obviously a big boiler room. It wasn’t creepy, just dirty and obviously the scene of much neglect.

The boiler, a big round rusty ugly green thing about ten feet tall, dominated this messy scene. Winant stopped in front of it and he and the naked girl looked up at it appraisingly. There were dials on it here and there, big pipes coming out of the sides, a utility ladder welded to it running up to the top, and what looked like a bolted-on trap door on the side near the bottom. “Cleaning the muck out of this thing is your assignment for today,” he said, as Tami’s spirits sank, her bare shoulders drooping as she contemplated this giant dirty monstrosity. “It’s been emptied and off for a couple of days, so don’t worry, it’s not hot anymore. See those pails?”

He pointed to four dirty, dented metal pals, bigger than the kitchen cleaning pails Tami was used to seeing, sitting to one side. Next to them, leaning against the boiler, was a shovel. “Look inside, there should be a crescent wrench in there,” Winant said, and walking over Tami could see there was.

“What you do is go in through the top hatch, take the buckets and shovel and wrench with you, and put the muck into the buckets. You don’t have to get it all, just enough so that the rest will dry and can be swept out with a broom. Just get as much out as you can with the shovel. The pails will be too heavy to lift out the top. So loosen the nuts on that utility door, and crawl out from there. Just leave the pails out on the floor for now, we’ll clean those away when we clean the rest of this sad sorry mess in June,” he said, waving his arm with disgust.

Tami looked down at the pails, then up at the top hatch, which now seemed about fifty feet up. Winant turned his wheelchair around and said, “Think about the guys who did this job before you, guys bigger than you, wearing clothes that got all sweaty and mucky. A skinny naked girl is the perfect person for this job. Just think about that,” he said, making his way out. Then Tami heard the hydraulic sound of the elevator and he was gone.

As she pulled up a pail with the shovel and wrench inside and climbed up the utility ladder, she was at least grateful that Winant didn’t stay behind to stare at her butthole as the ascended. She got up onto the big open hatch on top and looked down. Below her was a wide open mucky tank with a little ladder that ran down in mid-air to a point about three feet above the floor. Or what she imagined might be where the floor was, because she couldn’t see it. She wrinkled her nose as she contemplated the wet, muddy flat below her. Brown and red, it smelled a little like the sand at the beach, and also a little like red pepper. It was very fine and looked like the grounds of espresso coffee. She didn’t know how deep this muck was. But she would have to find out. Balancing the pail on one hand, she slowly descended, her toes clasping around each skinny rung of the little ladder.

Finally her foot was on the bottom rung. Tami looked down. The muck did not look any less threatening closer up. In dejection she carefully dropped the pail and its contents to the side. It slopped onto the muck with a quiet plop. No metallic ring to indicate that the pail had hit the bottom. This muck was not shallow.

Her face screwed up in distaste, as if she were saying in the way of the teenaged girl that she was, “Ewwww!”, the naked Tami slowly lowered her top foot the bottom rung and slowly, slowly, inched down her other foot. She took in a ragged breath as her big toe made contact. Yuck. Slimy, and cold. And a little grainy. Closing her eyes, she pushed her foot down, down, until it hit a cold metallic surface, then put her foot flat with a ghastly squish as it took on her entire weight. Silently she brought the other foot down. With resignation she let go of the ladder and looked down. She was standing in muck that came up a little above her ankles. She felt it oozing between her toes. It felt like she was barefoot in mud, a feeling she had never gotten to like in spite of having to walk through he mud many times, but this was worse. God knows what was in this goo. The weird smell, the weird color. Petrochemical. Maybe toxic waste! No, Mr. Winant wouldn’t put her to this if it was really toxic. But still, this goo was industrial and mysterious and horrid. And that funny seaweed/red pepper smell was especially intense now that she was right down in it.

With her first mucky sideways step the naked girl realized that the floor was slippery. Slowly she picked the shovel out of the pail and then the wrench. With tiny steps she shuffled over to the utility door. Bending over with her knees straight, she unscrewed each of the six bolts holding it on, something she did easily from her experience working on cars. Then, bracing herself by reaching back with her hand to push against the downhanging ladder, she pushed with her bare foot. It took a couple of tries, her toes making ghastly brown smears on the door, because it was on with a rubber seal which was stuck at first, but then the seal gave way with a sucking sound and the door fell out to the floor with a metallic clang. Gratefully she took in the breeze as a little draft of air came down from the top hatch and out the little door, which was about three feet high. She calculated. At the end of her labors she could probably crawl out of this thing without having to go on her hands and knees.

It was part of her plan to keep her exposure to the muck confined to her feet and ankles. As she surveyed her surroundings, a circle about ten feet across, she figured that with luck she could get this done in maybe an hour. The shovel was short and she had to bend over to scoop and plop the first load into the pail. The wet plop made it sound like she was shoveling soft, mushy cow dung. Yuck, yuck . . . She knew it would be easier to squat down but did not want to risk touching the muck with her butt. So she carefully spread her legs and bent her knees in order to get the shovel to lie flat and scoop more efficiently. She looked down and saw her pussy slips slightly parted, her white bare cleft a big contrast over the dark goo below. She was aware that she was in a position like she was trying to take a shit, and was thankful that for once there was no one to see her in such an embarrassing pose. “Thank you, God,” she found herself saying aloud, aware of how little a thing it was to be thankful for.

The naked girl shoveled a small circle around the pail, exposing little streaks of the dull gray metal of the floor. She thought of grounds crew guys doing this job in past years. Yes, it would be worse, doing this job in heavy clothes. Even naked as she was she was working up a sweat. The ideal outfit, she finally decided, would be to be nude except for tall rubber boots.

As she grunted with effort she heard her voice echo through the tank. She stood absolutely still, listening to the echo decay, and was struck by how utterly silent the building was. She was the only thing moving in it.

Alone, and relieved to be so, Tami became engrossed in her thoughts. She daydreamed about Ned and Ethel. How like grandparents they were! She missed her own grandparents since they died a few years ago. She imagined herself being invited over to their house for supper after work, a little grandparent-type house with flowers in the window and home-made doilies on the couches. And her, dressed primly in corduroy pants, a cotton shirt, sneakers and white socks. Maybe saddle shoes. No, now I’m getting hokey, she told herself. Still, she wanted to escape into a 1950’s - style picture of domesticity and bliss. In which she was modesty and abundantly clothed.

She felt she could read so much into characters of Ned and Ethel from the few conversations she had had with them on the telephone. Ned, practical, old-school on time, by the book but kindly. Crusty but loveable. Ethel, kindhearted, patient, always able to talk Ned out of being too harsh. Tami would fit right in. She knew she would make a fine, smart, hardworking assistant. One that they would be proud of. She was so ready for this!

With her concentration wandering so, disaster was inevitable. Straining to push the shovel out one more inch, her widely-spread left foot slipped outward and her right foot did the same in the opposite direction. Both feet shot up, splattering muck on the far wall, as her widely-spread thighs dropped and she landed right on her bottom. “SHIT! SHIT! SHIT!!” she said, banging her fists down, which only served to plunge her hands into the goo as well. “Shit!” she said again, defeated, looking down. She was sitting in the silty muck that came up over the tops of her pussy lips. She could feel it oozing into her opened pussy, and sitting on it she could feel it grinding up into the sensitive skin of her butthole. As the silty goo pushed into her private crevices she could feel every vile gritty grain. She almost cried.

Hating herself and her stupidity, she put her hands down to steady herself and slowly stood up. Miserably she looked down. Mud covered her entire shaved pussy, dripping down the insides of her thighs. To her horror she realized that she could feel that some of it had gotten inside. Behind, she couldn’t see it, but she could feel mud covering the bottom of her butt cheeks and oozing down between her legs. The backs of her legs were covered as well, all the way down to the feet. Taking stock of her situation, she felt sweat about to drop into her eyes and absently rubbed her forehead, getting mud on it, then passed it over her flat, sweaty tummy, leaving a brownish red streak there as well. Realizing she was making it worse and worse, she closed her eyes to collect her thoughts.

In a moment she was back at her task, going about it much more comfortably on her knees as she shoveled muck into the pail. What difference did it make now? she told herself. Knees muddy, forehead muddy, now even her shins and hips got muddy as she felt no hesitation about wiping away sweat and scratching any itch she had. She had a few itches on her nipples and soon her breasts were stained as well. What the heck, she told herself, I’ll wash it off anyway. The important thing is to get this job done a.s.a.p.

One pail, two pails, then three pails full of muck gradually appeared outside the tank. Finally Tami scooped the last half-shovelful of muck into the fourth pail. She stood up and surveyed what she had done. A pretty good job. There were streaks of mud still on the floor, but she guessed they would dry as Mr. Winant said. She judged it maybe an hour and a half since she had begun. She looked down and held her arms out. Practically all of her was either covered with or marked up with muck, especially on her pussy and butt and on her feet. And the muck was starting to harden and dry and crack, a very unpleasant feeling. She felt the caking goo inside her pussy lips and against her butthole and knew she couldn’t wash this junk off her and out of her a minute too soon.

She crawled out through the door and emerged into the big boiler room, glad to be out of tank, which had become stuffy and humid with her body heat. She trudged over to the big utility sink she had seen before.

She turned the faucet but it mocked her with the breathy sound of air passing through empty plumbing.

“SHIT!!” she yelled, stamping her bare, caked-up foot against the rough concrete floor. It was only then that she realized that with the boiler emptied it was no surprise that the water would be turned off in the whole building. “SHIT!!” she yelled again. Her voice echoed through the big room. The mud-covered, naked girl stood in the dank, messy basement for a moment, her mud-caked, concave tummy moving in and out with the deep breaths of her distress. Then she realized there was only one thing to do. Run to the dorm as fast as she could and plunge under a shower.