Those Who Walk Alone At Night

Chapter Three- The Bad. (Three and .5 Cigarettes.)

Cookie lights another cigarette in the hope that this is the one that kills her. Her back and shoulders curl off the wall and her head dips down, her lips parting as she holds the cigarette between them still over a small orange flame. It has been a while since she held anything as ephemeral as embers betwixt her fingers. She breathes in smoke and her head is filled with constellations.

It was impossible to know what she was stealing by standing there. The attention of those who walked past, the little pieces of the universe they carried in their back pockets cluelessly, their hope of making it home that night. Their wallets.

A sleight of hand, she calls it.

But someone who was mad would call it magic.

Someone leaves the bar around the corner, the opening of the door creating a cacophony as the clutter and prattle of noise escapes into the hazy night. She wasn't in a nice part of town; she shouldn't be here. The door rattles against its frame as it closes, and she drops the butt of the cigarette into a puddle beside her. Someone's shadow stretches into the alley, and by the time her boot crushes the ashes, it's gone. Fearfully. The city is too quiet as it tries to judge her, and she doesn't notice over the roar of fire in her chest.

Perhaps she stole to replenish what she had lost, perhaps not.

She catches sight of herself in the ripples of the water, muddled with embers and tar, and there's a disgusting churn of smoke and blood in her lungs as she lights another cigarette. 'Smoking is a bad habit,' countless voices say, or, 'that's bad for you, you know?' or, 'that will kill you, someday.' She was a bad habit, too, and the chances of her being the one to die that night got lower with every person who passed her. There were no stars in the sky, and it didn't matter. She was out of wishes anyway.

Someone else left the bar, and she only had two cigarettes left. She ran out of them the way she ran out of lies to tell, and this time she leaned her head against the brick, felt the bite on her skull, and lifted the lighter's little flame with frozen hands.

Her throat was sore from swallowing cigarettes and coffee for breakfast, and it burned when she gulped air down along with dead fire. It made her eyes water, so she closed them and imagined what it'd be like to watch everything she claimed to love burn to ashes.

The smoke escapes her cracked lips and her fingers shake with the badly lit cigarette between them, and someone else leaves the bar. She's on the last one and it's late enough now the shadows are dark and heavy. She's hidden in them, all but the wispy, consuming embers of her last cigarette. Whoever it is turns into the alley and doesn't notice her until it's too late. She lets them keep their wallet because she's addicted to cigarettes and bad decisions, but maybe the right people

The thought makes her bitter, makes her resent how she has changed, bites at her and burns her until she takes one last long, generous inhale, and pushes off the wall to follow.

They were all living in the same universe, but she was seeing it differently and there was no way to know if she was trying to breathe it all in or smoke it all out.