Short Stories

Cigarette Butts

This story was originally wrote for a One-Shot, which is in my One-Shot book, and then I improved on it for Uni.

Reign leaned over the bathtub, her chin grazing the side of the porceline. The water swayed with the movement and washed over her body, her tail flipped over and adjusted itself as she turned to me in the tub.
"Your back? So soon?" She more stated than asked, she didn't look happy about it either. She slipped back into the grimy bath, now more uninterested in my presence. Her webbed hands groomed her jet black hair that carefully swayed in the cold bath water. "Get me a smoke." The cigarettes were on the bathroom's bench, just out of reach for her to satisfy herself. I shut the door properly and retrieved a single fag and handed it to her. She stuck it in her mouth and then mumbled "Light."
"No one's ever going to believe that I have a smoking mermaid in my bath."
"Get over it." She crowed. "Light." She said again, her tail flipped in front of her in agitation. She paused and watched as I scrambled in my pocket for a lighter. "It's not like you have any friends to tell anyway." I bent down to the bath and lit the cigarette that stuck out of her mouth. She breathed it in. The cigarette was like her tongue, poisonous, troublesome and gave people second hand baggage.
"What do you want me to do?" I asked, slipping the lighter back into my pocket away from her reach. It was like that; I was her savior, the one that harbored her in this bathtub. I was the one that lit her cigarettes and had control over her unusual addiction. Truthfully, she had more control over me, she hit me in the spots I was the most vulnerable.
My back was up against the wall and I slowly started sliding down the tiles toward the ground, my butt being soaked from the water that splashed out of the bath earlier. My head slipped into my hands. I was sick of mermaids. She was rude and disgusting. She had a mouth that spat scorpion stings and her breath was toxic vapor. I was sick of this bathroom. It had been like this for weeks now. I was in and out, lighting cigarette after cigarette. Opening up the window when the smoke got too thick, and closing it when Reign got too loud. I wanted rid of her.
"You look pathetic." She said from the bath. I slowly parted my two fingers that guarded my eyes, so I could still see her behind the safety of my hands.
"I have a condition." I grunted, weakly.
She purred like a sick tiger. "A condition." She mused and took a deep heave of her smoke. "Cry me the ocean. Does being an idiot, count as a condition now?"
"No! Shut up!" I yelled. My fingers shook out of my control against my face. It wasn't just the heavy smoke that made it hard to breathe, neither was it just the mermaid or the bathroom itself. It was like everything made it hard to breath. My lungs felt like they were working slower than usual, that every breath was an increasing struggle getting more painful with every thought I conjured and every word Reign breathed with her smoke y breathe. Even if I walked away from Reign's bitter words and the smoke ridden bathroom there would still be something making it too hard to breathe.
"Pathetic." Reign scoffed. "You wouldn't be in this mess if you weren't such a winey little bitch. You could have left me you know. It wouldn't have been that hard."
I SHOULD HAVE! I wanted to yell. My voice had gone on vacation at that very moment, my brain was trying it's hardest to make my lungs breathe and my embarrassment trying to calm my twitching body from Reign's glaring eyes. The mermaid wasn't done taunting. "Oh dear, a poor helpless creature... maybe I can save it. It can be my best friend since I'm so lonely and stupid. What a fucking fairytale this will be. The kind of movie shit I've been dreaming about." She imitated this high pitch voice which she had done before to represent me. "Poor baby." She said as if she was talking to a puppy. "Would you like me to be your best friend? We can go swimming together and play chess and tell each other our deepest darkest secrets." She flipped the cigarette out of her mouth. "Want to know mine. I fucking hate you." She said it so flippantly like she had told a million people and it was no new news.
"I'm sorry, I didn't know." I almost screamed. My hands trembled against my face and I pushed them against the tile floor and dug them into the floor until they bent and hurt to try, just to get them from shaking. "How was I supposed to know you would be- be this. I hate you." I couldn't breathe, my lungs were rigid. My mouth went agape, begging for my body to react and take in the new air. My inhaling adjusted quickly, I was taking hurried breaths as I watched the mermaid, with my back pinned against the wall. A gravelly, snakish grin curved up against Reign's mouth and she let out a hiss which turned into a laugh.
"Fucking pathetic." She clapped her demented hands. She calmed down after taking several more sips from her smoke. "Get me some more water." I shook as I crawled on my hands and knees to the door.
"You can fill it up yourself." I croaked, my knees shaking. I had to leave the room before she saw my tears. The ones she had seen so many times and called pathetic and weak. I stood up using the support of the handle, and kept my eyes averted from Reign.
"Go buy me another pack of cigarettes." I saw her hold a cigarette up in the corner of my eye.
"Fine." I grunted before leaving.

When I finally summoned up the strength to see Reign again it was witching hour. I had convinced an older kid to buy me some cigarettes a few hours before sundown and couldn't bring myself to come near the bathroom until an hour ago; where I just cowered outside the door, chewing my crooked fingernails till they bled. I stepped inside the dark bathroom, and didn't even hear Reign turn to see me. She was so ungrateful. She hadn't smoked since the morning when I was here, and yet the smoke had settled like dust in the room.
There was an awkward moan as I cleared my throat in the darkness. "I've got some good news, I know how to get you out of here." It was a lie. I didn't know how good of a liar I was but I needed to talk to someone; and there was never anyone to talk to but Reign. She didn't reply, maybe she had caught onto the lie? Maybe she was just wishing that I left the room and never came back? Maybe she was biding her time, anticipating for me to say some stupid things and then torment me about it? I could see her tail half out of the bath in this darkness. "I thought vampires didn't sleep." I joked, knowing I would get yelled at about how she was a mermaid, not a vampire and I was so stupid to not recognize that. Maybe a vampire would have been a better friend than a mermaid... if they were real. But there was no response. In fact for Reign she was now unusally quiet. She liked to complain. She liked to demean others. She would be demanding her smokes by now. "Reign, I got your cigarettes." She still hadn't replied. It was unlike Reign to have a hissy-fit and not say a word, she would rather be heard than to have a quiet tantrum. I walked over to the light switch and flicked it on. Reign hadn't preformed a disappearing act, she was still here. I walked up to the statue-like figure in the bathtub. Reign lay perfectly still on the porcelain, her neck holding up none of her head's weight and the water submerged her body up to her parted flaky lips. I dropped to my knees on the soaked bath mat by the tub, the pack of cigarettes falling from my hands and sliding along the wet floor for a few seconds.
"Reign." My fingers fell to the water; I carefully touched it, it was no longer water but had turned into transparent sludge. Cigarette butts had littered the water; I had never looked into the tub like this before, but I could see them, everywhere, she lay on them, they lay on her, there was even some littered in her hair. Reign's eyes had gone black, the whites of her eyes and the iris had merged into darkness. She looked like she was sweating, but the condensation on her body was ooze that was transforming the bath water, it was her own mermaid-unique rigor mortis. "Reign. No." I said, tears were dripping from my eyes like loose blood. I pulled my fingers from the sludge and looked at her blank face. She didn't exactly look peaceful. The back of black hair dangled from the rim of the bath toward the floor, while most of her locks had been captured in the sludgy water. "Reign. I'm sorry." I said as I came to realisation. She was dead. The mermaid had died in my bathtub. I was rid of her. I was rid of her constant degradation. I was rid of her baggage. I was rid of having to come back into this room and supply her with expernsive cigarettes. I was rid of acting as her verbal punching bag. I was rid of this bitch. This bitch that wished I was just as dead as she was now. But there was something worse than that now. I was now rid of the one person I had to talk to in this whole world. I was rid of my desperate fairy tale aspirations. "Don't go, Reign." I begged her empty body. "I hate you, but I hate it here. Don't leave me. That's not fair you asshole." My tears joined the bath water. "I don't want to be alone." My hands banged against the porcelin until they turned red with ache. "DON'T FUCKING LEAVE ME!" I yelled. My hands banging the tub until the bruises started to show.
"Fuck!" I cursed, my head resting on the bath side, my breaths shallow as my anxiety climbed up through my throat. I felt myself vomit, as if I was watching my body rather than being in control of it. The hurled stomach acid slid down along the side of the bathtub and joined Reign in the bath. A mix of death and filth and sludge and water. I was pathetic. A second time I vomited into the bath. This time only painful yellow stomach bile joined the dead in the water. Now Reigns body mixed with cold watery glue and sour acid. She wasn't my friend, that was true. But she talked to me. She told me what a waste of space I was on this earth. But at least she told me. No one else told me that. No one else would talk to me. I grabbed the packet of cigarettes off the ground and deliriously broke the packet open and emptied the contents in my lap. "Did I take too long getting these for you? Look they are here now." I picked one up and pulled out my lighter and lit it. The cigarette started to burn in my fingers and I fitted it into her parted lips. The cigarette touched the water and went out. I grabbed another, lit it and placed it in her mouth. It went out again. Then I did it again, another after another, I filled her dead mouth with cigarettes. "Please Reign." I said, under the smell of death and cigarettes and bile. "I'm so alone."