Tears Thick Enough To Stain

Three

It was a pack of twenty smokes he’d scavenged, he’d used ten up during the week and there was ten left. He’d already swallowed the pills. He was simply waiting now, just waiting to float away with the smoke that rose up to the ceiling on account of the final ten cigarettes he’d decided to chain smoke, one after the other after the other. This part was the hardest. Waiting. Did he regret it? Not yet. He presumed he’d begin to regret it in his very last minutes, but it would be too late by then. He considered getting up and texting Matt to pass the time, but then he remembered he’d wiped his phone clear of everything, reverted it to factory settings. He’d done the same with his laptop, but not his iPod. That was placed in Matt’s box, right next to the letter telling Matt everything he wanted the boy to know about anything and everything. He’d put letters in his mom and dad’s boxes too, but Matt’s took the longest to write.

The smoke was starting to get a little stifling now, so he cracked open the window a little. He grabbed his bottle of cologne from the ‘Junk’ box, sprayed it across his body in an ‘x’ formation, and returned to the corner where he previously sat. He lined up the cigarette butts in precise little lines, placing the box and the bottle at the end of the row. Everything about this was curiously neat, unusual to Josh’s typical see-how-it-goes organised chaos. But then this was an unusual occasion.