Tobacco has a minion!

Vox the Firefox

i.

She had a habit of counting discarded cigarette butts as she walked. Almost effortlessly. She could carry on a lucid conversation and simultaneously count and count and count and count. Her friends would frequently interject, "How many?" And she would always know. She herself was not a smoker. Or rather, she refrained because of her fear of addiction. She wasn't addicted to anything. "But aren't you addicted to counting?" To which she would reply, "No. It's an obsession. Or compulsion. Obsession? Compulsion..." Counting was her way of smoking vicariously. She envisioned the smoker sliding out the thin cigarette, proficiently lighting the tip, and the satisfaction of the first pull. She lived vicariously through these fantasies.

She did smoke once, actually. She and her best friend were atop a lifeguard tower late at night, watching the ice from the lake melt and two skinny dippers made fools out of themselves, running in the water, screaming, running out of the water, screaming. She laughed a little, producing a cigarette she had stolen from her mother earlier that night and a pack of matches. Her friend repeatedly swiped the match along the coarse surface —— ripping across, bending the match, starting a fire. She watched the ignition —— a puff of smoke transmuting into a ball of pointed fire. Her heart also ignited into a warm, humming anticipation, but maybe that was just an anxious arrhythmia. He took a drag and passed her the cigarette. She sucked in the smoke and held it in her mouth. Exhaled. Nothing. He said, "You know, the thing I hate most about smoking is that little puff of resistance you get when you pull the smoke into your lungs." It was dark enough that he didn't notice her cheeks, flushed with embarrassment, as she realized silently that she'd been doing it wrong. When she finally did succeed in taking a drag, she got such a head rush that she almost fell out of her seat. She couldn't properly focus on one thing, as if her eyes were crossed. A rigid pain sliced her discombobulated chest. She liked it.

ii.

She's never purchased a cigarette pack before. Probably never will. She smokes spontaneously, whenever she finds a pack on the ground. Three to a pack is lucky. Once she found one half-full but threw it away because she didn't realize how much she would end up wanting it. Forget counting cigarette butts —— that's long over now that she's tasted the discombobulation of actually smoking, as opposed to just visualization.

Once she was walking on the train tracks with the same friend, insidiously acclimating to the sweet smell of cereal wafting through the air, when she noticed a pack of cigarettes on the ground. She plucked it up without disrupting her equilibrium and pulled out the two Marlboros in the pack. The friend, who doesn't smoke now, timidly asks, "Do you think you're smoking more nowadays?" She laughs, realizing he thought she was going to smoke both at the same time. "That'd be a hell of a buzz."

iii.

Hunger apparent, she stands delicately at the door, faking a solitude, smoking —— silently contemplating nothing —— with a pleasant taste in her mouth. She takes a drag and pricks her finger on the porch woodwork. It bleeds a drop. She wipes it on her shirt. She pauses, then worries more about the stain than being caught smoking obviously on her porch.

iv.

Cigarillos were not for her. At one point she tried a grape-flavored cigarillo and hated it. It was like drinking too much —— so much tobacco in one hit —— it sent her reeling about; giddy and silly —— finally falling on the sand beneath her, staring up at the night sky. She smoked more and identified the constellations with the same friend. But swallowing the smoke was like swallowing a goldfish; she could only get halfway through the cigarillo before she had to stop and breathe normally. Any hit after that caused great distress, so she threw the rest of it into the ocean, unsmoked. She waited for the satisfying tsssss sound the cherry makes when it's forced to extinguish itself in the water.

"God, I hate this grape-flavored shit. It just tastes like medicine to me. Like that medicine you took as a kid and scrunched up your little face because it tasted so rancid. Why do they bother even flavoring medicine? It just ruins the real flavors! We're in Key West, Florida for chrissake! Shouldn't we be able to buy some nice cigars with exotic flavors?" The friend was quiet, still contemplating the constellations. "Come on, we can probably see Cuba from here!" She pointed to the darkness. "Cuban cigars tomorrow, what do you say? We could even get a Cuban breakfast! I saw a place a block away from the hostel." The friend seemed to acknowledge nothing.

The next day they did buy some Cuban cigars from a little corner stand that looked like it was made out of cigar boxes itself. The friend mildly requested, "One cherry, vanilla, honey and uh, a regular one please."

v.

A slick, slender white tube of tobacco. Something she interacts with every day, yet sometimes fails to even recognize. She'll pull out the orange pack and fall into the rhythm of the morning. Such patterns, reflexes —— everyone has them. It scares her how people get used to worse and worse things.