Story: Three Cigarettes

An electronic bell tolls. The doors, open, fidget, and then slide smoothly into each other. A voice announces the next destination, and the time estimated for the journey. Five minutes. A jolt. The weird sensation of movement, when we are stationary.

Headlines blare themselves at me from a copy of the national paper, the upper corners of its sheets fluttering like eyelashes. A textbook slips from a lap, its crash accompanied by sounds (vulgarities bowdlerized and muted). A shoulder negotiates a head that is drooping and jerking and drooping.

A cigarette taps against the doors. Unlit. Held by slender fingers. A pale hand connects itself to a V’d arm. A bored face stares out into a dark tunnel, and the body itself, sheathed in black and black, staccatos to an unknown beat. He is wearing a long silver chain dulled by the yellow light. His hair is carefully disheveled, and a tuft sticks out like a middle finger directly in front of the sign that says No Drinking, No Eating, No Smoking.

The beat trips, interrupted. His head shifts –

The tip of the cigarette beats a tattoo on the glass. The toe of his shoe bumps repeatedly against the floor…

An electronic bell tolls. The doors slide open. He smiles glimmeringly at me, throws a hand up, and exits.

The doors slide shut. I think, I can write about this…

---

A flame flicks upwards, and he touches the cigarette tip to it. Beside him, I concentrate on the television and try not to interfere. His head cocks towards me, his elbow nudges me weakly, and his index finger straightens towards the screen. A pungent aroma fills the air, and he lolls his head back on the couch, coughing.

He tries to get up, and he half-falls back. I catch him, and his body tenses, but then he allows me to help him into the wheelchair. Do you want a glass of water, I say. I just want to go to the kitchen, he rasps. I reach for the cigarette, but he wrenches his arm away from me in a grotesque mockery of savageness. An instant passes, and I wheel him into the kitchen.

He gets a cup by himself. He opens the fridge door himself. I take the filled jug, pour, and replace it. The cup rests precariously in his lap as he closes the door. Then he wheels himself, cup spilling, to a corner. He stops, his back to me, his bent head haloed in smoke.

He is only my uncle. He is only a relative returning from a life made and spent in Canada. He hasn’t been here that long, and soon he will be gone. But not soon enough. Not nearly soon enough.

I leave the kitchen.

---

Her hands are on the steering wheel; she has apparently forgotten about ignition. A split second later, she is being wracked by sobs. Her eyes become artfully smeared even as her tightly wound hair remains pristine. But the meticulously built-up breakdown reaches out through the television screen, and reaches into me. It thrashes around in its search, throwing to surface all sorts of memories related and unrelated. And then it finds something to hold onto, something guttural in nature, and that something it twists and wrenches.

I cannot stop crying, as long as she is crying. It sounds like a moment awash in emotion and tears, but it is not. It is a moment of startling clarity, of intense self-pity and compassion recognized, if the two are not one and the same.

She stops, eventually, as do I, in a dissipation of feeling. She filches the half-smoked cigarette from the ashtray, and gets out of the car. Her hand twitches as she inhales, and then the cigarette disappears under a vengefully grinding heel. The screen, which completely disappeared for only a moment, is restored fully. And now there is a commercial break.