On Her Break

She stood up, brushing the dust from her derriere, stretching slightly, perhaps to relieve the stiffness from sitting a while on bare concrete. She put her cigarette to her lips for one last, intense drag, drinking in a final draught of smoky pleasure.

Ah, what the anti-smoking commercials fail to understand! They show somebody running around licking a trash can lid and a fly swatter and they ask, “Can anyone tell us why smoking isn’t stupid” – making a read-between-the-lines comparison between the two.

I ask, “Can anyone tell us why eating a jelly donut isn’t stupid? Riding a motorcycle? Having sex?”

Nobody, unless they are utterly insane, gets any pleasure from licking a trash can lid.

As she inhaled, the young clerk-on-break that I saw outside Such and Such Large Department Store was quietly invoking Goddess Nicotine to grant her bodily ecstasy – fleeting, of course, but ecstasy none-the-less.

She exhaled. I was happily downwind and I inhaled. For a second or two, I shared the sweet smoky breath of this beautiful stranger, the evanescent mist that had danced upon her tongue and explored the depths of her lungs, that had set her heart to racing and soothed her pleasure centers like a subtle lover.

She stubbed out her cigarette into the cluttered ashcan in front of the store. Wrong, all wrong. Fair maidens should have their own, exclusive, worthy public receptacle to dispose of their spent cigarettes. Not some glorified trashcan crowded with the wet cigar butts of old men and other unappealing detritus.

She went back to work. All good things must end.