care for a smoke?

…I stub out my cigarette as we reach the opposite sidewalk and pull another out of the crumpled pack of Camel Filters I’m holding in my wallet pocket. A flick of my thumb opens the now disintegrating lid and I offer her a second one.

She shakes her head; the slight curls of her oil-black hair obscuring her face as she declines. I don’t usually chain smoke either; I excuse it, telling myself it has been a Sisyphusian day at work and an astonishingly bitter January to boot. Besides, the heat that drips molasses-slow out of the filter is currently worth more to me than any long-term health effects that the surgeon general may have stumbled across through the years.

I pull out the square by its white-flecked khaki butt and flick my black midget Bic a couple of times before putting flame to the tobacco. First, a long, slow drag; I watch the tip glow bright orange and let the smoke linger on my tongue, my taste buds absorbing the strangely comforting acrid tang.

I inhale and the city’s air, thick as the smouldering tobacco, plunges the now-stale smoke into my lungs. Stale but still hot, my opaque oral ghost deposits its nicotine – and god knows what else – on the inside of my lungs and the warm visceral rush of the stimulant speeds from my chest out to the tips of my fingers…