Someday, Ernie decided, he would write a book: The Day a Loser Hit the Jackpot.

How else to describe Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2002?

Last week, he lost his job. This week, he'd gotten another one, but he wasn't sure he would be there long. It was too much to handle, too much hi-tech computer stuff.

Monday, the brakes had gone out on his car and it would be Thursday before he'd get the thing back. So, here he was at a boring bus stop, late for work, watching ants crawl on the concrete and feeling lonely.

If he had any real friends, they'd have given him a ride.

There he sat. Then she showed up.

She came sauntering down the sidewalk like it was a fashion show catwalk -- tall, exquisitely poised and absolutely beautiful. Her thick blonde hair tossed with each step and she wore a creamy white blouse and short black skirt a size too tight that hugged her like it loved her. Her painted digits beneath long, long legs, peeked out of white open-toed sandals.

She looked like Miss Fortune 500. What the hell was she doing here?

She stepped right past him as if he was invisible, and sat beside him without a word. She was wearing some incredibly sweet perfume and he inhaled it hungrily, like a kid sucking in the scent of a mall bakery.

She was sitting so close that when she tossed her hair, it brushed teasingly against his arm.

Ernie, however, was about to get even luckier.

From within her stylish purse, the woman extracted a tiny cellphone and began a conversation with someone named Penny.

Lord, she had a pretty voice. He closed his eyes for a minute and just listened to the lovely way her lips shaped her sentences.

"Yeah, Penny, the damn Hyundai slid on I-25 and hydroplaned. F----d up bad. I'm out of a car for a week, maybe two. Got to ride the f---g bus, like a DUI or something."

He couldn't believe the naughty words spewing out of that adorable mouth.

It was about to get better.

She stretched out a lovely limb and with a savage one-two twist of her sandal, crushed out the life of an ant that had gotten too curious about her, then a second that had come to investigate the fate of its sister ant.

"Yeah, I'm safe here. Still in the good part of town. Hope the bus comes soon. This place is crawling with ants. Some yahoo must have left food around, " the woman said, extending her leg again to squash a third unfortunate.

Still chatting with the amiable Penny, the woman reached into her purse again and this time, brought out an elegant white box.

Virginia Slims.

Cigarettes.

This beauty was a smoker! Ernie felt adrenaline surge like espresso coffee through his veins, felt his breath catch in his throat, found himself praying to every god he knew that the bus would never come. The hell with his new job.

The woman plucked a VS Light 120 from its package and twirled it in her fingers a moment. She held it to her nose and sniffed gently.

Then she crumpled the elegant but evidently empty pack in her hands and tossed it out of the bus shelter onto the ground.

A murderer. A smoker. A lady litterburg. Ernie felt dizzy with excitement. And she hadn't even lit up yet. He

would have to wait for that. For she reached into her purse again and this time, extracted a tissue and a tube of lipstick. She wiped her mouth and dropped the tissue onto the floor of the bus stop. Then, in a long, slow slide of her hand, she applied a new coat of crimson color to her lips, pressing them firmly together to complete her work.

Ernie tried not to stare but he was in utter awe of this goddess. He pretended to be interested in some kid walking a dog across the street.

Her primping done, the woman lifted the virgin cigarette faceward again and her painted mouth suddenly parted, making room for the arriving filter tip. She thrust it deeply into the red-ripe pillows of her lips, ensuring that no air holes would be allowed to dilute the purity of the smoke.

He could see, out of the corner of his eager eye, that she had clamped down so hard on the cigarette that her lips actually were pushed a little out of shape by the filter tip.

As she prepared to light it, digging again in that magic purse for a lighter or a match, he could see she was already breathing through the cigarette. He wondered how sweet that breath must taste, drawn through the golden grains of the raw tobacco.

She found a match. The cigarette bobbed in her lips as she bent down and concentrated, tearing the match loose from its paper backing and then gripping it with her thumb and two fingers and scraping it to fumey life.

In a cloud of sulfur smoke and a flash of light, she raised the burning match before her face and touched it to the tip of her cigarette. Her pretty cheeks collapsed and the flame seemed suddenly to be vacuumed into the grains of tobacco.

A fierce coal burned now before her face, a tiny red cherry of tobacco from which only a bare wisp of silver smoke escaped as she dragged the rest of it hungrily into her mouth. The white paper of the cigarette end rolled back into oblivion as her first puff continued, as she pulled the hidden smoke into the very depths of her lungs, dragging as if she wished to saturate every cell of her breathing apparatus with nicotine all at once.

Her fingers, which had formed a protective "v" around the cigarette, now dropped away for a moment, allowing the last seconds of her first puff to be taken with only her lips clasping the cigarette.

Such feminine fingers, so long, slender, prettily painted, marvelously manicured!

Now they lifted again and cradled the middle of the cigarette as finally her lips relaxed their squeeze of death around the filter. The cherry, freed momentarily from the woman's inhale, began to smolder fiercely, sending out twisting tendrils of smoke. Her fingers gripped the cigarette gently, lowered it slowly. Her crimson lipstick had stained half the filter, imprinting the white tip forever with the mark of her mouth.

She opened her mouth, wide, and he could see her teeth, shining in the cottony fog of her smoke; could see her tongue, licking around the fumes like a cat lapping up milk.

Then the last of the fumes surrendered to the pull of her lungs, vanishing down the dark cavern of her throat.

Somehow, through all this, she had kept up her conversation with Penny.

He counted two seconds that she held the smoke inside her lungs, enough time for her to answer some question posed to her by her phone friend.

Then she angled her lips away from the phone. His heart stopped. She wouldn't! She wouldn't spare her precious phone and soak him instead! Would she?

She did exactly that. Creeping across her lips at first, then suddenly swelling into a torrent, smoke boiled out of her mouth and sprayed across his face from mere inches away, so close that he could actually feel the warm wind of her breath pushing against his face, so thick that the world around him seemed to vanish and all that he could see, smell and taste was the strong, sweet, fresh smoke that her mouth had so recently savored. He inhaled the heavenly fumes, wanting them to sink deep inside of him, wanting the secondhand tar and nicotine of her cigarette to burn up his own lungs.

She didn't give a damn about him. She absolutely did not care about puffing her smoke into his face, a total stranger. Had he become invisible?

It was about to get better.

She lifted up her cigarette and snapped off a shower of ashes -- directly at him.

This was insane! His clothes were sprinkled with flecks of gray. She had to have noticed.

She did not notice. Her conversation with Penny was apparently reaching a deeper level of interest.

She parted her lips again and took another deep drag. He could see her throat shifting, working to swallow down the thick, strong smoke, to force it into her lungs, to dose herself with a heavy hit of nicotine.

Again, she turned away from the phone and forcefully exhaled his direction, as deliberately as if he were the candles on her birthday cake. He felt the tip of her exhale reach his face, followed up by the billowing gusts emptied from her full lungs, rolling up into his nose and eyes and spilling down his chin and neck. He had no air to breathe, nothing but what little oxygen was mingled with the smoke and spent breath that was streaming out of her mouth.

She lifted the cigarette and snapped off the ash again, dropping a whole morsel of ash onto the edge of his coat, where it speedily burned a hole.

Again, she opened her lips and sucked in another mouthful from the helpless and swiftly vanishing cigarette. Ernie's own body was blazing with the effects of her nicotine. After all, he was a non-smoker and certainly not used to this.

But this time, she kept her lips closed. Was she never going to exhale? Ah yes, she was going to exhale. Twin streams of smoke suddenly blasted from her nostrils -- as before, launched heedlessly into his face.

He saw it coming, ugly as Satan's chariot, the damn bus. It failed to explode into oblivion according to his fervent prayer, rolling instead to a noisy stop before them.

The woman stood up. She shook out her hair, hung up the phone with Penny and walked towards the bus. He followed in a black cloud of disappointment.

But all was not lost. As they reached the steps of the bus, she took one last, incredibly deep drag, while the bus driver tapped impatiently on his steering wheel.

"No smokin' in the bus, lady. And don't you blow that crap in here," he growled.

"The hell with you," she retorted. But she turned her head to exhale. Ernie, being directly behind her in the stairwell of the bus, so close in the cramped space that if she had poked out her tongue, she would have wet his lips, caught it full and entire in his face, and she never blinked once, not until the last bit of smoke had crossed her lips and pushed against his mouth.

As for the smoked-down cigarette?

Ernie was about to see an incredible sleight-of-hand move. She stretched her arm out and flicked the cigarette into the street. Or so it appeared.

As he settled into the back of the bus, he would learn otherwise. For without asking any sort of permission, she seated her lovely self beside him, pressing her ample hip warmly against his own bony side. And then the cigarette reemerged from where she'd managed to hide it -- how, the devil only knew -- and she took three more puffs before she was finally satisfied. Apparently being a creature of habit, or perhaps in an effort to keep the driver from seeing her smoking, she leaned in and exhaled all three puffs firmly into Ernie's face.

Ernie was not going to tell.

As the last of her exhale died away, the woman dropped her cigarette on the floor of the bus and stepped on it, twisting with that same deadly stroke of her ankle that had broken the bodies of those ants back at the bus stop.

She reached into her purse again. Was she going to light another cigarette? This was beyond belief.

No, all good things must end. She plucked out a piece of gum, extracted her old piece from her mouth and rudely wedged it against the edge of the seat, then dropped the empty wrapper on the floor.

She then took out her hair brush and vigorously tamed her lovely golden locks, which sent quite a few strands drifting across Ernie's much-abused body.

The bus came to a halt. Her stop. She stood up ... too soon. The bus jerked slightly forward. Later, thinking back, Ernie recalled a bit of a smirk on the driver's face. Blue-collar revenge, perhaps, on haughty upper-class women.

The women fell back and before she caught herself against the bus seat, Ernie had his final surprise of the day. For her lovely, skirt-clad rump tumbled against his face and in that blissful instant, his nostrils were filled with the perfume and smoke fragrance of the fabric; and his senses with the delicious round softness of her ripe posterior.

She regained her feet without an apology or a look back and sauntered down the aisle. That was okay. It would be a week before her car was fixed, and he wasn't planning to pick up his. Not anymore. Not any time soon. Maybe not forever.

As long as any hope yet lived, of a rerun of this day in heaven.