A Cigarette Siren

David Sebesta

Billy tipped the day’s first smoke. He thought he probably ought to get going if he wanted to be on time for school; however, school was a distant, abstract concept, and the morning was gorgeous. Most of the leaves in the park had turned yellow, and now they were shining in the sun’s feeble rays. The sky was a light blue, and Billy thought, yellow and blue, those had to be royal colors. The contrast between them!

His breath steamed in the cool air as he put his second cigarette between his lips. He caressed its filter with the tip of his tongue, the way he’d caress a lover’s lips. He flicked on his lighter and inhaled gently. God, the contrast between the flame and the sky.

The smoke tasted sublime.

He remembered a Rolling Stones song, “Heaven,” and swayed to its remembered rhythms as his respiratory system danced its danse macabre with the cigarette. #

The problem was that no one really got him. He had some smoking buddies and knew some cool people at school, but no one really got him. Smoking at a prodigious age, he was destined to hang out with older folks who invariably considered him a child.

#

He hadn’t thought he cared about the health effects. He’d once heard a story about an old woman who was still smoking at eighty. When her grandkids tried to get her to stop, she threw their bullshit right back at them: “I’ve only one life. I won’t waste it not smoking.”

But then Paul told him in PE class that he didn’t “run so fast no more,” and suddenly Billy was worried, and then Becky told him he stank—so he decided to quit.

His smoking buddies took it quite badly. Sometimes he wondered whether not smoking was worth alienating them, but more often he simply craved a cigarette. #

The train station was a decrepit affair, and Billy hated it. Its yellow plaster was peeling, and there were pigeons everywhere—but it was the only station in town, and he had to get home from school somehow.

One day there was a girl smoking by a graffitied wall. She was wearing black jeans and a leather jacket. Her hair was jet black, and her face sported several silver piercings, the same silver as the zippers on her jacket. She looked like a modern Siren, and maybe that was what she was—he was enchanted by the way she held her cigarette, like an extension of herself. And oh, the smell!

“You want one?” she asked him.

“I…I shouldn’t,” he said. He tried being proud of how long he hadn’t smoked, but he was tired. Not smoking was like walking a tightrope, and he was tired.

“Really, who should?” the girl asked with a crooked smile.

“I was going to start again about a thousand times this week.”

“What stopped you?”

He shrugged. “I thought I did. But now it seems more like it was my delusions.”

“What delusions?”

“I thought I was this whole new person, you see.”

“I get that too, sometimes.” She looked at the sky, which was the slate gray of winter now. “Like I want to be a whole new person.” She smiled. “Except then I want to run away, and I end up realizing I’d just bring my problems with me.”

“Clean slates are a lie,” Billy agreed.

“Then filthy yours,” she said and handed him the smoke. He took it, and—oh God—it felt so good, so right.

David Sebesta is currently studying high school in the Czech Republic, where he also happens to live. Besides reading and writing, he likes listening to music, going on walks, or hanging out with his friends— however, when they are unavailable, he also likes to hang out with his two cats.

Munimara