Omaha

In the county fairgrounds outside Omaha, the Nebraska State Fair was in full swing.

Fiona, eating a candy apple, wandered around the fairgrounds in the company of her new friend Jolene, a red-headed former sheriff who’d run into a little inconvenience back home in Nevada and decided to try her luck further east. They saw horse races, displays of experimental seed drills, exhibition halls full of prize hogs and giant pumpkins. The ladies’ baking contest was the highlight of the show, with farmwives and city slickers from all across the Midwest squabbling over whose devil’s food cakes, warm apple and cherry pies, molasses taffy and homemade plum jams were the stickiest and most delicious.

“Say,” said Fiona, glancing out west at the endless rolling plains. “What’s that on the horizon?”

“Probably nothing,” said Jolene, also eating a candy apple.

They passed by the temperance booth of the Ladies’ Moral Decency League, selling lemonade and handing out pamphlets on why all beautiful women ought to comport themselves with decorum and modesty at all times.

They passed by the campaign booths of two squabbling candidates for governor, Delilah Plunkett and Henrietta Stone, both dazzling beauties who found themselves severely at odds over the question of whether ankle-exposing skirts ought to be made legal in Nebraska. Delilah, a brassy blonde who owned a cattle ranch and three Omaha pool halls, was for it. Henrietta, a brunette Sunday school teacher and LDML chapter president, was firmly against.

They passed a makeshift stage, where an all-female company of travelling actors was performing a misremembered version of Twelfth Night, all clad in yellow stockings beneath their voluminous dresses, and stopped to watch a patent-medicine salesman extol the curiously abstract virtues of Pipp’s Invigorating Unguent, which he claimed could put a spring in anybody’s step. Fiona’s candy apple was almost all gone.

“It’s getting closer now,” she said, watching the tall black pillar on the horizon. “Are you sure it’s not important?”

“It’s only a tornado,” said Jolene, absent-mindedly, tossing away the core of her own completed candy apple. “Nothing to be afraid of.”

“But aren’t tornados terribly frightening?”

“Yes, but they’re also unpredictable. Nobody knows what they will and won’t do.”

“That’s even more frightening,” pointed out Fiona, as heads across the fairgrounds turned, observing too late that the tornado was about to strike. “Jolene, I think we’d better run away.”

“It might be too late,” admitted Jolene, as the tornado plunged into the busy fairgrounds. First, it struck the LDML temperance booth, where the roaring gale-**** winds meticulously ripped the dresses and undergarments off every last one of the lovely, modest, church-going girls manning the place, leaving them standing stark naked and very surprised in the middle of the busy fairgrounds. The girls watched in horror as their clothes were whisked away into the clouds, then looked down at their nude, immodestly exposed bodies and began to squeal and blush, doing an awkward little two-handed dance to cover their indecent parts as people around them started to laugh.

Delilah and Henrietta were right up in each others’ faces, too caught up in political disputation to notice the impending pillar of wind. The tornado picked them both up in strong hands of air, lifted their skirts over their heads to expose their bloomers to the watching farmers, turned them upside-down and pulled all their clothes off piece by piece, before grabbing a rope from a nearby tug-of-war match and using it to bind the squabbling girls together in an intimate clinch.

The tug-of-war took place over a pit of cold wet mud, into which the losing team was intended to fall, and the pair of bare-naked lady politicians were dropped right into it from a height of about ten feet. Since they were still tied together, and the mud was very slippery, it was almost impossible for them to get out. Soon enough, Nebraskans had gathered at the pit’s edge to laugh down at the infuriated, squirming girls, who felt their nipples brush against each other as mud squelched against their warm bare skin and they struggled to escape the rope.

All the lady actresses had their dresses blown up over their heads on stage, exposing their yellow stockings and matching panties, which they had mistakenly thought were a crucial component of authentic Shakespearean performance. The audience cheered and applauded, mistaking it for an especially saucy part of the show.

The wind toyed with the actresses as they struggled to hold down their dresses, before exerting just a little bit more puff to whisk the aforementioned garments off over the blushing ladies’ heads, as well as removing their corsets to leave the girls trapped on stage in only panties and stockings before a crowd of hooting, disrespectful country yokels. Then, as the ladies yelped and covered their bare breasts with their hands, it uncorked several large bottoms of Pipp’s Invigorant Unguent and coated the girls’ bare skin with the oily, viscous, gleaming purple substance.

The girls gasped in shameful pleasure as the unguent, an incredibly powerful aphrodisiac cooked up from cactus juice and distilled rattlesnake venom (don’t try this at home), was absorbed into their skin. The modest, controlled sensible parts of their minds shrieked in warning, but their bodies were now under the control of their raw animal lusts. They embraced each other, kissing passionately before the crowd, fondling each other’s breasts, utterly mortified by what they were doing but quite unable to restrain their passions. They sank to their knees, peeling off each others’ panties as they began to play with themselves and lick each other’s pussies for everyone to see.

“Quick,” said Jolene, grabbing Fiona by the arm. “Hide in here! The tornado will never follow us into the ladies’ baking exhibition tent.”

A few seconds later, the entire tent was picked up and whisked away, exposing the dozens of beautiful women inside to the gathered state fair crowds. Farm wives, cowgirls, saloon dancers, fashion-conscious big-city belles, plain-spoken daughters of the prairie in simple cotton dresses, stood among the gigantic piles of cake and jam and pie and other sticky treats, not sure which way to run. The hems of skirts began to flap.

The girls fled this way in that, squealing in terror as the powerful winds of the tornado inverted dresses, exploded corsets, pulled knickers down. Whipped cream, molasses, cherry pies, raspberry jam and apple butter were flung this way and that with gleeful abandon. Fiona and Jolene found themselves mounted on top of the gigantic butter cow in the centre of the pavilion, facing each other, both buck naked and yelping in sticky discomfort as their nude forms were bombarded by an endless torrent of delicious dessert products, drenching them from head to toe in custard, cream, pie filling and jams of all descriptions.

Some girls’ hands and feet were bound with stray lengths of tablecloth, and others found the bloomers of strangers shoved into their mouths. Some girls were left tied up in compromising positions, unable to wriggle free from convenient trees or hitching posts as more cherry pies were slapped into their faces, breasts and pussies, and pitchers full of cream were tipped over their heads. Some girls even found themselves spanked by the wind, wooden spoons manipulated by the breeze in just such a way as to pepper their bare bottoms with repeated stinging blows, while others gasped in horror as their legs were parted and large, knobbly carrots and zucchinis from the nearby produce stalls were crammed into their sensitive, soaking-wet pussies.

And, by some strange accident of nature, the tornado was able to snatch dozens of portable cameras from the stand of a nearby inventor, who’d thought the Nebraska State Fair was the perfect place to launch his wonderful new technique for instant photographic development. It wasn’t entirely clear how mere air alone could press the buttons, but soon enough thousands of brilliant full-colour pictures of the farm girls’ astonished, sticky nude humiliation were flying through the sky like confetti above the fairgrounds, landing directly in the hands of local roustabouts and schoolboys (all over eighteen).

In fact, for years to come, photographs of embarrassed naked women would occasionally be known to rain from the skies all across the West, landing in Kansas and Iowa and some even as far away as San Francisco.

Finally, the tornado veered back to grab some more bottles of Popp’s Invigoranting Unguent, and painted the nude bodies of what was now every last woman at the Nebraska State Fair with the sticky substance. And then it veered off towards Omaha, leaving the bare-bottomed and exquisitely embarrassed pretty country girls behind in front of thousands of gawking, laughing yokels, with all their clothes gone and a strange heat beginning to burn between their legs.

The spectacle of an entire local chapter of the Ladies’ Moral Decency League licking cream and cherries off each other’s naked bodies, cheeks burning, fully aware of how shameful it was for a group of decent, church-going young women to taste each other’s nipples and lap at each other’s clits in a hot, sticky lesbian orgy in broad daylight, but utterly unable to control their traitorous, lustful urges, was widely deemed by the patrons to be the single most entertaining spectacle at that year’s state fair. Of course, there was stiff competition.

Meanwhile, every single item of female clothing in Omaha had been confiscated by the tornado, and every last townswoman was thrust naked from her office or bedchamber into the public street. There’d be no more clothing shipments from downriver for months. It was going to be an interesting spring.