Cover Art

ah, love is in the air...

Earl did cover art.
You know, he was the guy who drew the pictures on the front of books.
Sometimes he'd do the back, too.
Earl was really good at what he did,
but he hated it.
He hated it because, for some reason,
he got stuck doing the cover art on poetry books,
which meant he mostly drew dead trees and leaf swept cemeteries.
He would've much preferred doing the big-breasted women
on the covers of sleazy romance novels.
In fact, had Earl gotten to draw big-breasted women
he wouldn't've minded the second thing about his job
that he couldn't stand,
and that was having to tell other people
just exactly what he did for a living.
When it got down to it,
there really was no easy what to explain it.
Well, not to the people he knew,
especially since none of them had ever seen any of his stuff.

So Earl lied and told everyone that he was a fireman,
including his wife.
He even went so far as to rent a room at the fire station
so his wife wouldn't get suspicious
when she dropped him off at work,
and every once in a while
he'd trash himself out with soot and stuff like that --
just for realism.

And his wife bought it, too.
Well, Mindy might've gotten suspicious
had she not been so busy with a career of her own
as a hot shot brain surgeon.

This is what happened.

You see, the guys at the station let Earl go out with them now and again.
Well, it so happened that one day Early went along to a fire
that just so happened to be at a doctor's office
that just so happened to be where his wife worked.
And, of course, Mindy saw Earl standin' around with his hands in his pockets,
and it was more than obvious that he wasn't a fireman,
what with him not blastin' stuff with a hose
or choppin' up stuff with an axe and all.

But then, it was pretty obvious that Mindy wasn't a doctor, either.
She would've been standing around with her hands in her pockets, too,
if she would've had any pockets.
As it were,
instead of trying to rescue charts and patients and things like that,
she was just standing there holding onto a slightly charred manuscript.

Come to find out,
Mindy rented a spot at the doctor's office
so Earl wouldn't know that she actually wrote sleazy romance novels.
She really had meant to tell him,
but she wanted to wait until she had a really big seller.
It wasn't that Mindy didn't have good stuff;
it was just that she needed some really good cover art.

And of course, the rest of the story is pretty obvious.