There are many interesting things he found under the pillows in the course of his travels. Some times it was a block of pink cement that proved conclusively the existence of unintelligent life on the third star to the right. Other times, it was a pair of the greenest eyes that let him see all the other creatures that inhabited his space – explaining finally the sudden appearance of many an unwelcome odor.
But what he found this time under his pillow turned out to be even more amazing. It was a half-used black pencil and a note filled with crude illustrations and pasted words from a dictionary that seemed to him to say – “I am sorry I cannot speak your language but I can see from the impression on this pillow that you must have a wonderful head!"
By the process of elimination that involved some painful investigative phone calls to the colony of his ex-wives, he concluded that the note could have only been left by the hotel's maid. But how did she know he was a world-famous pencil drawer? Which was exactly the question he asked her on a note he left under the pillow, along with a sketch of his head so detailed that you could even see the thoughts that were going through his head at the time.
The next evening he came back home, he found another sweet note. He interpreted it to mean – “Please draw me a castle where we both could live because I think I love you, pencil giant!”
This kind of candidness took him a bit by surprise, but he consoled himself by thinking that the maid must be a gorgeous nymphette with non-synthesized chest appendages and it was quite ok to share a castle with such a creature. So he drew her a beautiful castle, so precise in form and sentiment that you could just hear the clanging of the closing gates after the cyber-beavers who installed the satellite microwaves finally removed their squeaky selves from the castle’s premises.
The next evening, she left a note of even more awe and wonder before his prodigious skill. And she said he was the man of her dreams and it would be such a treasured experience to meet him. But she was just a bit shy before such a great man and maybe they could just speak through pictures for a while? Maybe he could draw for her a super-turbo-charged spaceship with flashing rims?
And so he did draw the spaceship. And for the next month kept drawing all manner of amusing and unbelievable things at her request. Even drew a picture of how he wanted her to imagine him – a tall man of muscle and smile, with hands that could make any woman scream out the secret names of the gods.
But as his commission on the planet drew to a close (he was here to paint the sky purple), he asked her if they could finally meet and be together as they always planned they would. Hasn’t the time come?
“Yes, it has” – she agreed. But on the morning of the arranged date, there was a knock on the door while he was still in his pajamas, unshaven and generally not yet ready for the romantic randezvous of his life. She came early! And as he was very unprepared for this moment, he waved about his hands (still taking time to notice that the maid was, in fact, a being of mental and sexual perfection). He was trying to tell her to wait downstairs for ten minutes while he made himself a decent man.
And she seemed to agree to this course of action, but when he ran down nine minutes later, he found no trace of her anywhere! It was very sad as he looked around for her for the next two days with no luck at all. Finally, he had to get on a ship and leave this dusty planet, forever heart-broken.
And as he wallowed in eternal sadness, the maid was soaking in happiness of intensity equal to the amount of the artist’s despair. What was really happening the whole time is that the things he was drawing for her were actually drawn with a magic superstring pencil that made all those objects become real on a nearby planet. And she was basically using his skill to create for herself a nice life – to share with the perfect man he himself drew for her. She did not need the drawer any more, and when she came to his door that morning, it was just out of pity – maybe to give him one chance to offer her something she could not even imagine. But when he started waving his hands about, she knew she was right - the dream of love is better not left to chance…
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