The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016 by Laura Furman

Author:Laura Furman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-09-06T04:00:00+00:00

Sam Savage

Cigarettes

MY LANDLADY STANDS IN the doorway, one hand braced on the jamb, breathless from climbing the two flights of stairs to my room. She’s come up to bum a cigarette. It’s the same old story. Her doctor convinces her to kick the habit, scares the shit out of her, sends her home full of virtuous resolve. All she can talk about for the rest of the day is how she’s finally quit smoking, how this time she really means it. Next morning, stepping into the kitchen, the first thing I see is her coffee cup on the counter, a couple of soggy butts disintegrating in the saucer. “It’s not worth it,” she says. “Next time I decide to stop, you need to tell me it’s not worth it.” I know how she feels, so I refrain from wisecracks and just hand her one. She lights it, takes a long drag, and sighs. The smoke drifts from her mouth and nostrils. “Shit,” she says. I twist my chair around to face her, tip it back against the desk, and light my own. We smoke a while, not talking. We are two-packs-a-day smokers, the landlady and me. Same for her brother, Clement, who has a separate apartment in the basement but spends most of his time upstairs in the kitchen or in the living room in front of the TV smoking. Clement rolls his own. It’s a house of smoke. One of us is always at it. Sometimes we are all three smoking at once, and the smoke gets thick as fog. There is a sticky film on all the windows. The landlady says there is no point wiping it off. There are not that many real smokers left. We are the last of a dying breed, Clement says. We stick together even though we don’t have much to say to each other. They don’t let you smoke in restaurants or bars anymore, so we never go out at night. Starting next year we can’t even smoke in the parks. I remember when you could smoke in movie theaters. Same with friends. Nobody gives parties where you can smoke anymore, and if you drop in for a chat they want you to stand outside in the rain to smoke, or in the freezing cold. Thrift shops are full of ashtrays that nobody wants anymore. If people have ashtrays, it’s to hold paper clips and the like. So we spend a lot of time together—me, Clement, and the landlady hip to hip on her little sofa, watching television and smoking. Of the three of us, Clement is the expert smoker. He can blow rings, one after the other. I can blow a ring now and then, but success is haphazard, and the rings are raggedy, not perfect Os like Clement’s. He can’t explain how he does it, says it’s just a knack. I’m not upset that I don’t have the knack. In my view blowing rings is not an important part of smoking.

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