Cigarette Broken Quotes

I think there's a secret part of me that would like to drop my entire life off a cliff and watch it break into a million pieces

You smoked another cigarette and we shared another coffee and it was just another morning that made me realise that this is all it takes to be happy.

It was a very ordinary day, the day I realised that my becoming is my life and my home and that I don't have to do anything but trust the process, trust my story and enjoy the journey. It doesn't really matter who I've become by the finish line, the important things are the changes from this morning to when I fall asleep again, and how they happened, and who they happened with. An hour watching the stars, a coffee in the morning with someone beautiful, intelligent conversations at 5am while sharing the last cigarette. Taking trains to nowhere, walking hand in hand through foreign cities with someone you love. Oceans and poetry. It was all very ordinary until my identity appeared, until my body and mind became one being. The day I saw the flowers and learned how to turn my daily struggles into the most extraordinary moments. Moments worth writing about. For so long I let my life slip through my fingers, like water. I'm holding on to it now, and I'm not letting go.

Travel is little beds and cramped bathrooms. It’s old television sets and slow Internet connections. Travel is extraordinary conversations with ordinary people. It’s waiters, gas station attendants, and housekeepers becoming the most interesting people in the world. It’s churches that are compelling enough to enter. It’s McDonald’s being a luxury. It’s the realization that you may have been born in the wrong country. Travel is a smile that leads to a conversation in broken English. It’s the epiphany that pretty girls smile the same way all over the world. Travel is tipping 10% and being embraced for it. Travel is the same white T-shirt again tomorrow. Travel is accented sex after good wine and too many unfiltered cigarettes. Travel is flowing in the back of a bus with giggly strangers. It’s a street full of bearded backpackers looking down at maps. Travel is wishing for one more bite of whatever that just was. It’s the rediscovery of walking somewhere. It’s sharing a bottle of liquor on an overnight train with a new friend. Travel is “Maybe I don’t have to do it that way when I get back home.” It’s nostalgia for studying abroad that one semester. Travel is realizing that “age thirty” should be shed of its goddamn stigma.

For me, the last few years of the postmodern era have seemed a bit like the way you feel when you're in high school and your parents go on a trip, and you throw a party. You get all your friends over and throw this wild disgusting fabulous party. For a while it's great, free and freeing, parental authority gone and overthrown, a cat's-away-let's-play Dionysian revel. But then time passes and the party gets louder and louder, and you run out of drugs, and nobody's got any money for more drugs, and things get broken and spilled, and there's cigarette burn on the couch, and you're the host and it's your house too, and you gradually start wishing your parents would come back and restore some fucking order in your house. It's not a perfect analogy, but the sense I get of my generation of writers and intellectuals or whatever is that it's 3:00 A.M. and the couch has several burn-holes and somebody's thrown up in the umbrella stand and we're wishing the revel would end. The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. We're kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we're uneasy about the fact that we wish they'd come back--I mean, what's wrong with us? Are we total pussies? Is there something about authority and limits we actually need? And then the uneasiest feeling of all, as we start gradually to realize that parents in fact aren't ever coming back--which means we're going to have to be the parents.

Art, literature, and philosophy are attempts to found the world anew on a human freedom: that of the creator; to foster such an aim, one must first unequivocally posit oneself as a freedom. The restrictions that education and custom impose on a woman limit her grasp of the universe...Indeed, for one to become a creator, it is not enough to be cultivated, that is, to make going to shows and meeting people part of one's life; culture must be apprehended through the free movement of a transcendence; the spirit with all its riches must project itself in an empty sky that is its to fill; but if a thousand fine bonds tie it to the earth, its surge is broken. The girl today can certainly go out alone, stroll in the Tuileries; but I have already said how hostile the street is: eyes everywhere, hands waiting: if she wanders absentmindedly, her thoughts elsewhere, if she lights a cigarette in a cafe, if she goes to the cinema alone, an unpleasant incident can quickly occur; she must inspire respect by the way she dresses and behaves: this concern rivets her to the ground and self. "Her wings are clipped." At eighteen, T.E. Lawrence went on a grand tour through France by bicycle; a young girl would never be permitted to take on such an adventure...Yet such experiences have an inestimable impact: this is how an individual in the headiness of freedom and discovery learns to look at the entire world as his fief...[The girl] may feel alone within the world: she never stands up in front of it, unique and sovereign.

5.57am and I’m finishing the last poem to the taste of the last cigarette. Smoke in my lungs, poetry on the paper. Inhale, exhale, it doesn’t get much easier.

And I can promise you something, because it was a thing I saw many years later - a vision in the book thief herself - that as she knelt next to Hans Hubermann, she watched him stand and play the accordion. He stood and strapped it on in the alps of broken houses and played the accordion with kindness silver eyes and even a cigarette slouched on his lips. The bellows breathed and the tall man played for Liesel Meminger one last time as the sky was slowly taken away from her.

I never have time to write anymore. And when I do I only write about how I never have time. It's work and it's money and I've written more lists than songs lately. I stay up all night to do all these things I need to do, be all these things I want to be, playing with shadows in the darkness that shouldn't be able to exist. Empty bottles and cigarettes while watching the sunrise, why do I complain? I have it all, everything I ever asked for.

WARNING: UNHAPPY ENDING! she wrote. If more bookshop owners had taken the responsibility to hang warning signs, her life would have been much easier. Cigarette packets came with warnings, so why not tragic books? There was wording on bottles of beer warning against drinking and driving, but not a single word about the consequences of reading books without tissues to hand.

History is natural selection. Mutant versions of the past struggle for dominance; new species of fact arise,and old, saurian truths go to the wall, blindfolded and smoking last cigarettes. Only the mutations of the strong survive. The weak, the anonymous, the defeated leave few marks: field-patterns, axe-heads, folk-tales, broken pitchers, burial mounds, the fading memory of their youthful beauty. History loves only those who dominate her: it is a relationship of mutual enslavement.

When Seymour and I were five and three, Les and Bessie played on the same bill for a couple of weeks with Joe Jackson -- the redoubtable Joe Jackson of the nickel-plated trick bicycle that shone like something better than platinum to the very last row of the theater. A good many years later, not long after the outbreak of the Second World War, when Seymour and I had just recently moved into a small New York apartment of our own, our father -- Les, as he'll be called hereafter -- dropped in on us one evening on his way home from a pinochle game. He quite apparently had held very bad cards all afternoon. He came in, at any rate, rigidly predisposed to keep his overcoat on. He sat. He scowled at the furnishings. He turned my hand over to check for cigarette-tar stains on my fingers, then asked Seymour how many cigarettes he smoked a day. He thought he found a fly in his highball. At length, when the conversation -- in my view, at least -- was going straight to hell, he got up abruptly and went over to look at a photograph of himself and Bessie that had been newly tacked up on the wall. He glowered at it for a full minute, or more, then turned around, with a brusqueness no one in the family would have found unusual, and asked Seymour if he remembered the time Joe Jackson had given him, Seymour, a ride on the handle bars of his bicycle, all over the stage, around and around. Seymour, sitting in an old corduroy armchair across the room, a cigarette going, wearing a blue shirt, gray slacks, moccasins with the counters broken down, a shaving cut on the side of his face that I could see, replied gravely and at once, and in the special way he always answered questions from Les -- as if they were the questions, above all others, he preferred to be asked in his life. He said he wasn't sure he had ever got off Joe Jackson's beautiful bicycle.

Bertie old man I say Bertie could you possibly come down here at once. Everything gone wrong hang it all. Dash it Bertie you simply must come. I am in a state of absolute despair and heart-broken. Would you mind sending another hundred of those cigarettes. Bring Jeeves when you come Bertie. You simply must come Bertie. I rely on you. Don't forget to bring Jeeves. Bingo. For a chap who's perpetually hard-up, I must say that young Bingo is the most wasteful telegraphist I ever struck. He's got no notion of condensing. The silly ass simply pours out his wounded soul at twopence a word, or whatever it is, without a thought.

I’m walking out in the rain again Pains the same as it’s always been Lungs full of smoke from my cigarette And my heart breaks with every step, But only a little bit Walking away from myself, not getting far Wondering if it’s you I see in each passing car

9:09 in the morning, the taste of liquor and cigarettes, no police, no lovers, walking the streets, this poem, this city, closing its doors, barricaded, almost empty, mournful without tears, aging without pity, the hardrock mountains, the ocean like a lavender flame, a moon destitute of greatness, a small music from broken windows… a poem is a city, a poem is a nation, a poem is the world…

About Hollywood. I feel like it’s a big ocean, full of bottom feeders, midlevel fish, the occasional shark, and some wonderful savvy whales, the elders, and the ones who guide you on your way. If you’re lucky enough, you get to be a dolphin and have your waves broken by the passage of these elders before you, but at the same time, you get an occasional shark bite in the tail and maybe one of the bottom feeders comes up and takes a little nibble. But I see myself as cresting a series of waves, dipping down, sometimes, lower than I’d like, but mainly kind of happily staying above. (smiles and takes a long drag of her cigarette) And, of course, I try to avoid the fishnets.

Somehow the wondrous promise of the earth is that there are beautiful things in it, things wondrous and alluring, and by virtue of your trade you want to understand them." He put the cigarette down. Smoke rose from the ashtray, first in a thin column then (with a nod to universality) in broken tendrils that swirled up to the ceiling.

If he found himself penniless, suicide was always there as an option. Suicide... When his thoughts arrived at this point, he found himself overtaken by a kind of psychological malaise. No matter how you looked at it, he reflected, to kill yourself just because you've suffered some setback required too much effort. If you've finally managed to carve some time out for yourself and flop out, you're hardly in the mood to get up and fetch a cigarete that lies just beyond your reach. Sure, you're dying for a smoke, but it remains just outside your grasp. In fact, it requires a huge effort to heave yourself up and fetch that cigarette: just like when you're asked to push a car that has broken down. That, in a nutshell, is suicide.

Doc awakened very slowly and clumsily like a fat man getting out of a swimming pool. His mind broke the surface and fell back several times. There was red lipstick on his beard. He opened one eye, saw the brilliant colors of the quilt and closed his eye quickly. But after a while he looked again. His eye went past the quilt to the floor, to the broken plate in the corner, to the glasses standing on the table turned over on the floor, to the spilled wine and the books like heavy fallen butterflies. There were little bits of curled red paper all over the place and the sharp smell of firecrackers. He could see through the kitchen door to the steak plates stacked high and the skillets deep in grease. Hundreds of cigarette butts were stamped out on the floor. And under the firecracker smell was a fine combination of wine and whiskey perfume. His eye stopped for a moment on a little pile of hairpins in the middle of the floor. He rolled over slowly and supporting himself on one elbow he looked out the broken window. Cannery Row was quiet and sunny. The boiler was open. The door of the Palace Flophouse was closed. A man slept peacefully among the weeds in the vacant lot. The Bear Flag was shut up tight.

For Padilla the shared act of smoking was basically a staging of loneliness: the tough guys, the talkers, the quick to forget and the long to remember, lost themselves for an instant, the length of time it took the cigarette to burn, an instant in which time was frozen and yet all times in Spanish history were concentrated, all the cruelty and the broken dreams, and in that "night of the soul" the smokers recognized each other, unsurprised, and embraced. The spirals of smoke were the embrace.

Morning now—theirs to add up the checks cashed here and there in clubs, stores, restaurants. Theirs to air the dank staleness of wine and cigarettes out of the tall blue front room, to pick up the broken glass and brush at the stained fabric of chairs and sofas; to give Bounds suits and dresses for the cleaners; finally, to take their smothery half-feverish bodies and faded depressed spirits out into the chill air of February, that life might go on and Wilson, Hiemer and Hardy obtain the services of a vigorous man at nine next morning. "Do

Art is supposed to reflect your journey through real life. Your discovery of your character in solitude and around other people, the moments of clarity when you feel loved and the moment when your heart breaks so much that you can hear it crack. When you run careless and free on open fields and when you're struggling on your way home on the bus. This is what makes you a real artist. Experiences, moments, stories. Falling recklessly in love, losing someone you love and then learning to belong to yourself again. Going to new places, meeting new people, driving in the middle of the night on empty streets. Going to the ocean and staying there until 6 a.m, smoking cigarettes and talking about roses and butterflies. These are the things that will give you something worth writing about, worth singing about, worth creating art around.

And I can promise you one thing, (...) that as she kneeled next to Hans Hubermann, she watched him stand and play the accordion. He stood and strapped it on in the alps of broken houses. There were silver eyes. There was a cigarette slouched on his lips. He even made a mistake and laughed in lovely hindsight. The bellows breathed and the tall man played for Liesel Meminger one last time as the sky was slowly taken from the stove. Keep playing, Papa. Papa stopped. He dropped the accordion and his silver eyes continued to rust. There was only a body now (...)

We began crafting ways to apply defusion and self skills to coping with the fear and pain of acceptance. Learning to defuse from the voice of the Dictator helps us keep a healthy distance from the negative messages that pop uninvited into our minds, like “Who are you kidding, you can’t deal with this!” It also helps diminish the power of the unhelpful relations that have been embedded in our thought networks, which are often activated by the pain involved in acceptance. For example, the relation between smoking a cigarette and feeling better will be triggered by the discomfort of craving a smoke. Reconnecting with our authentic self helps us practice self-compassion as we open up to unpleasant aspects of our lives, not berating ourselves for making mistakes or for feeling fear about dealing with the pain. We see beyond the image of a broken, weak, or afflicted self to the powerful true self that can choose to feel pain.

We drove to the ocean and smoked cigarettes until six in the morning when I fell asleep on your chest. When you woke up I was gone and you went back to yours, and I keep having my best conversations while the world is asleep, trying to find myself somewhere between dawn and the sunrise. Dear universe, may I never find myself.

Everyone in Chinatown seems to have a B side to his or her character---an untold story---Ernest reasoned as he lit a cigarette and remembered that one of his favorite songs was a Hank Williams flip-side record, "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry." That song had seemed to do pretty well. Then again, some say Hank Williams died of a broken heart.

Right after Matt died, I was afraid to do basically everything. I couldn’t even bite my nails or sniff my shirt to see if I needed deodorant without feeling like he was watching me. I willed and prayed and begged him to give me a sign that he was watching, that he was with me, so I would know. But he never did. Time moved on. And I stopped being afraid. Until right now, vulnerable and insecure and a little bit drunk. Lying in the sand and falling in crazy love with someone I just met. Matt is watching me. Observing. Possibly judging. And the worst part of it is, I don’t want to wake up under his landslide of sad rocks anymore. I don’t want to taste the marzipan frosting and the clove cigarettes. I don’t want to think about the blue glass necklace or the books he read to me on his bed or the piles of college stuff or some random boy in the grocery store wearing his donated clothes. I don’t want to be the dead boy’s best-friend-turned-something-else. Or the really supportive neighbor friend. Or the lifelong keeper of broken-hearted secrets.

That was when the carnival ended for Jessie Mahout. Ended? No, that wasn’t right. It was as if she had been afforded a momentary glimpse behind the carnival; had been allowed to see the gray and empty fields of autumn that were the real truth: nothing but empty cigarette wrappers and used condoms and a few cheap broken prizes caught in the tall grass, waiting to either blow away or be covered by the winter snows.

But there is also my brain and it is gently, unobtrusively asking me questions that don’t require answers because the answers are already there: it won’t last; he’s just TOO perfect for me, TOO handsome, TOO sexy; I’m not the one for him, if such a person exists at all. Sooner or later it will come to an end because the feelings disappear, even the strongest ones. They are inexorably broken down by life’s worries and problems and the fears that come with them. But with Alex it will most likely happen sooner rather than later – he is just TOO seductive and virtually all women without exception look at him TOO greedily. When it’s all over, he’ll simply step over us and move on and I... I’ll be abandoned like an empty cigarette packet on a dirty pavement. I have no desire to fade away in the scorching sun, covered in dust and dripping wet with dirty rainwater.

Something dangerous is beginning: I am coming late to my own self. I made an appointment with my thoughts- the thoughts were snatched from me. I made an appointment with Faulkner- but they made me go to a banquet. I made an appointment with history, but a grass-widow dragged me into bed. Worse than barbed wire are birthday parties, mine and others', and roasted suckling pigs hold me like a sprig of parsley between their teeth! Led away for good to a life absolutely not my own, everything that I eat, eats me, everything that I drink, drinks me. I made an appointment with myself, but they invite me to feast on my own spareribs. I am garlanded from all sides not by strings of bagels, but by the holes of bagels, and I look like an anthology of zeros. Life gets broken into hundreds of lifelets, that exhaust and execute me. In order to get through to myself I had to smash my body against others', and my fragments, my smithereens, are trampled by the roaring crowd. I am trying to glue myself together, but my arms are still severed. I'd write with my left leg, but both the left and the right have run off, in different directions. I don't know- where is my body? And soul? Did it really fly off, without a murmured 'good-bye! '? How do I break through to a faraway namesake, waiting for me in the cold somewhere? I've forgotten under which clock I am waiting for myself. For those who don't know who they are, time does not exist. No one is under the clock. On the clock there is nothing. I am late for my appointment with me. There is no one. Nothing but cigarette butts. Only one flicker- A lonely, dying, spark...

At length, when the conversation-in my view, at least -was going straight to hell, he got up abruptly and went over to look at a photograph of himself and Bessie that had been newly tacked up on the wall. He glowered at it for a full minute, or more, then turned around, with a brusqueness no one in the family would have found unusual, and asked Seymour if he remembered the time Joe Jackson had given him, Seymour, a ride on the handle bars of his bicycle, all over the stage, around and around. Seymour, sitting in an old corduroy armchair across the room, a cigarette going, wearing a blue shirt, gray slacks, moccasins with the counters broken down, a shaving cut on the side of his face that I could see, replied gravely and at on cc, and in the special way he always answered questions from Les - as if they were the questions, above all others, he preferred to be asked in his life. He said he wasn't sure he had ever got off Joe Jackson's beautiful bicycle. And aside from its enormous sentimental value to my father personally, this answer, in a great many ways, was true, true, true.

I don’t know why some of these memories must remain so crystal clear. I recall one sliver and the whole picture comes rushing back, while other things, for instance, other things I would like to remember, are completely unavailable. If only memory were a library with everything stored where it should be. If only you could walk to the desk and say to the assistant, I’d like to return the painful memories about David Fry or indeed his mother and take out some happier ones, please. About stickleback fishing with my father. Or picnicking on the banks of the Cherwell when I was a student. And the assistant would say, Certainly, madam. We have all those. Under “F” for “Fishing.” As well as “P” for “Picnicking.” You’ll find them on your left. So there my father would be. Tall and smiling in his work overalls, a hand-rolled cigarette in one hand and my fishing net in the other. I’d skip to keep up with him as he strode the broken lane down to the stream. “Where is that girl? Where are you?” The hedgerow flowers would boil with insects and my father would lift me to his shoulders and then—What? I haven’t a clue. I don’t remember the rest.

Bertie old man I say Bertie could you possibly come down here at once. Everything gone wrong hang it all. Dash it Bertie you simply must come. I am in a state of absolute despair and heart-broken. Would you mind sending another hundred of those cigarettes. Bring Jeeves when you come Bertie. You simply must come Bertie. I rely on you. Don’t forget to bring Jeeves. Bingo. For a chap who’s perpetually hard-up, I must say that young Bingo is the most wasteful telegraphist I ever struck. He’s got no notion of condensing. The silly ass simply pours out his wounded soul at twopence a word, or whatever it is, without a thought.

A kiss instead of a salutation, disrobing, the neon signs nullifying the effect of the extinguished lamp, the double bed with its superannauted spring squealing piteously, impatient hugs and kisses, the first cold contact of the skin of their bodies after the sweat had dried, the smell of flesh and pomade, endless groping for satisfaction filled with impatience for the same bodies, little screams belying masculine vanity, hands wet with hair oil.. Then the pitiable perspiration, the groping under pillows for cigarettes and matches, the faintly shining whites of eyes. Then the endless conversation surging as over a broken dam, and the descent to the childish play of satisfied, tests of strength in the dark night, stabs at wrestling, various other inanities....

Look at that, Kovacs. We’re drinking coffee so far from Earth you have to work hard to pick out Sol in the night sky. We were carried here on a wind that blows in a dimension we cannot see or touch. Stored as dreams in the mind of a machine that thinks in a fashion so far in advance of our own brains, it might as well carry the name of God. We have been resurrected into bodies not our own, grown in a secret garden without the body of any mortal woman. These are the facts of our existence, Kovacs. How, then, are they different, or any less mystical, than the belief that there is another realm where the dead live in the company of beings so far beyond us we must call them gods?” I looked away, oddly embarrassed by the fervor in Hand’s voice. Religion is funny stuff, and it has unpredictable effects on those who use it. I stubbed out my cigarette and chose my words with care.

But this was worse than personal. This was about Louise, alias Anemone, cut up on a surgical platter, about Elizabeth Elliott stabbed to death and too poor to be resleeved, Irene Elliott, weeping for a body that a corporate rep wore on alternate months, Victor Elliott, whiplashed between loss and retrieval of someone who was and yet was not the same woman. This was about a young black man facing his family in a broken-down, middle-aged white body; it was about Virginia Vidaura walking disdainfully into storage with her head held high and a last cigarette polluting lungs she was about to lose, no doubt to some other corporate vampire. It was about Jimmy de Soto, clawing his own eye out in the mud and fire at Innenin, and the millions like him throughout the Protectorate, painfully gathered assemblages of individual human potential, pissed away into the dung heap of history. For all these, and more, someone was going to pay.

Officers approached the 43-year-old Garner on July 17 in a high-crime area near the Staten Island Ferry Terminal and accused him of illegally selling untaxed cigarettes—the kind of misdemeanor that Broken Windows policing aims to curb. Garner had already been arrested more than 30 times, mostly for selling loose cigarettes but also for marijuana possession and other offenses. As captured in a cell-phone video, the 350-pound man loudly objected to the charge and broke free when an officer tried to handcuff him. The officer then put his arm around Garner’s neck and pulled him to the ground. Garner repeatedly stated that he couldn’t breathe, and then went eerily stiff and quiet. After a seemingly interminable time on the ground without assistance, Garner was finally put on a stretcher to be taken to an emergency room. He died of cardiac arrest before arriving at the hospital. Garner suffered from severe asthma and diabetes, among other ailments, which contributed to his heart attack.

Is that what we do? We pitch our tents, do our little clown shows, and then take off up the road to the next town ahead? Leaving our science-fictional debris on the blasted dirt to poison the minds of future generations, like the alien litter in STALKER and ROADSIDE PICNIC. Flying cars rusting out like Saturn Five rockets propped up as roadkill talismans at Kennedy, leaking toxins into the soil. Jetpacks oozing fuel from cracks in their tanks and poisoning the grass. Three-ring moonbases crumbling in the solar wind. Birdshit on the time machines. Big fat rats scavenging broken packs of food capsules, Best Before Date of 1971. A Westinghouse Robot Smoking Companion, vintage of 1931, slumped up against a tree, tin fingers still twitching for a cigarette. Vines growing through a busted cyberspace deck. The shreds of inflatable furniture designed for the space hospitals of 1955. Lizards perched atop a weather control cannon. Atomic batteries mouldering inside the grips of laser pistols abandoned in the weeds.

He was walking down a narrow street in Beirut, Lebanon, the air thick with the smell of Arabic coffee and grilled chicken. It was midday, and he was sweating badly beneath his flannel shirt. The so-called South Lebanon conflict, the Israeli occupation, which had begun in 1982 and would last until 2000, was in its fifth year. The small white Fiat came screeching around the corner with four masked men inside. His cover was that of an aid worker from Chicago and he wasn’t strapped. But now he wished he had a weapon, if only to have the option of ending it before they took him. He knew what that would mean. The torture first, followed by the years of solitary. Then his corpse would be lifted from the trunk of a car and thrown into a drainage ditch. By the time it was found, the insects would’ve had a feast and his mother would have nightmares, because the authorities would not allow her to see his face when they flew his body home. He didn’t run, because the only place to run was back the way he’d come, and a second vehicle had already stopped halfway through a three-point turn, all but blocking off the street. They exited the Fiat fast. He was fit and trained, but he knew they’d only make it worse for him in the close confines of the car if he fought them. There was a time for that and a time for raising your hands, he’d learned. He took an instep hard in the groin, and a cosh over the back of his head as he doubled over. He blacked out then. The makeshift cell Hezbollah had kept him in in Lebanon was a bare concrete room, three metres square, without windows or artificial light. The door was wooden, reinforced with iron strips. When they first dragged him there, he lay in the filth that other men had made. They left him naked, his wrists and ankles chained. He was gagged with rag and tape. They had broken his nose and split his lips. Each day they fed him on half-rancid scraps like he’d seen people toss to skinny dogs. He drank only tepid water. Occasionally, he heard the muted sound of children laughing, and smelt a faint waft of jasmine. And then he could not say for certain how long he had been there; a month, maybe two. But his muscles had wasted and he ached in every joint. After they had said their morning prayers, they liked to hang him upside down and beat the soles of his feet with sand-filled lengths of rubber hose. His chest was burned with foul-smelling cigarettes. When he was stubborn, they lay him bound in a narrow structure shaped like a grow tunnel in a dusty courtyard. The fierce sun blazed upon the corrugated iron for hours, and he would pass out with the heat. When he woke up, he had blisters on his skin, and was riddled with sand fly and red ant bites. The duo were good at what they did. He guessed the one with the grey beard had honed his skills on Jewish conscripts over many years, the younger one on his own hapless people, perhaps. They looked to him like father and son. They took him to the edge of consciousness before easing off and bringing him back with buckets of fetid water. Then they rubbed jagged salt into the fresh wounds to make him moan with pain. They asked the same question over and over until it sounded like a perverse mantra. “Who is The Mandarin? His name? Who is The Mandarin?” He took to trying to remember what he looked like, the architecture of his own face beneath the scruffy beard that now covered it, and found himself flinching at the slightest sound. They had peeled back his defences with a shrewdness and deliberation that had both surprised and terrified him. By the time they freed him, he was a different man.  

Christina died of a stroke in the fall of 1971, at the age of sixty-one. June watched the nurses take her mother's body away. Standing there in the hospital, June felt like she'd been caught in an undertow. How had she ended up here? One woman all alone, with four kids, and a restaurant she had never wanted. The day after the funeral, June took the kids to school. She dropped Kit off at the elementary building and then drove Nina, Jay, and Hud to junior high. When they pulled into the drop-off circle, Jay and Hud took off. But Nina turned back, put her hand on the door handle, and looked at her mother. 'Are you sure you're OK?' Nina asked. 'I could stay home. Help you at the restaurant.' 'No, honey,' June said, taking her daughter's hand. 'If you feel up for going to school, then that's where you should be.' 'OK,' Nina said. 'But if you need me, come get me.' 'How about we think of it the other way around?' June said, smiling. 'If you need me, have the office call me.' Nina smiled. 'OK' June felt herself about to cry and so she put her sunglasses over her eyes and pulled out of the parking lot. She drove, with the window down, to Pacific Fish. She pulled in and put on the parking brake. She took a deep breath. She got out of the car and stood there, staring up at the restaurant with a sense of all that she had inherited. It was hers now, whatever that meant. She lit a cigarette.

That’s how the Sukulowskis got out?” Captain Byner asked. “Yup.” Joe lit a cigarette. “Where’d they end up?” Joe tossed his match in the ashtray. “You don’t really want to know.” Rico said, “Gentlemen, I agree with you. Freddy was a fucking asshole going after Montooth in the first place.” Freddy, already aggrieved, looked even more dismayed. “You were.” Rico looked Freddy in the eye and formed a circle with the thumb and index of his right hand. “Huge asshole. Size of a fucking paint can.” He turned to the other men in the room. “But, gents, we can’t let a nigger kill a white man. Even if it’s a nigger we like, and I like Montooth Dix. I’ve broken bread with the man. But still. And we can’t let a guy who’s not in our thing kill someone who is. No matter what. Dion? Joe? You two taught

The blue eyes watched the Texan as his python skin boots took him into the dimness of the hall of doors and his escape from Corazon’s ICU was a clip clopping stride of broken confidence caught in the rebellious lighting of a cigarette.

you know if she smokes?” “Cigarettes? No

street, nor when two owls swooped overhead. In fact, it was nearly midnight before the cat moved at all. A man appeared on the corner the cat had been watching, appeared so suddenly and silently you’d have thought he’d just popped out of the ground. The cat’s tail twitched and its eyes narrowed. Nothing like this man had ever been seen in Privet Drive. He was tall, thin and very old, judging by the silver of his hair and beard, which were both long enough to tuck into his belt. He was wearing long robes, a purple cloak which swept the ground and high-heeled, buckled boots. His blue eyes were light, bright and sparkling behind half-moon spectacles and his nose was very long and crooked, as though it had been broken at least twice. This man’s name was Albus Dumbledore. Albus Dumbledore didn’t seem to realise that he had just arrived in a street where everything from his name to his boots was unwelcome. He was busy rummaging in his cloak, looking for something. But he did seem to realise he was being watched, because he looked up suddenly at the cat, which was still staring at him from the other end of the street. For some reason, the sight of the cat seemed to amuse him. He chuckled and muttered, ‘I should have known.’ He had found what he was looking for in his inside pocket. It seemed to be a silver cigarette lighter. He flicked it open, held it up in the air and clicked it. The nearest street lamp went out with a little pop. He clicked it again – the next lamp flickered into darkness. Twelve times he clicked the Put-Outer, until the only lights left in the whole street were two tiny pinpricks in the distance, which were the eyes of the cat watching him. If anyone looked out of their window now, even beady-eyed Mrs Dursley, they wouldn’t be able to see anything that was happening down on the pavement. Dumbledore slipped the Put-Outer back inside his cloak and set off down the street towards number four, where he sat down on the wall next to the cat. He didn’t look at it, but after a moment he spoke to it. ‘Fancy seeing you here, Professor McGonagall.

Cigarette smoke curls up like the toes of every dead thing, and I murder this room like some quiet, careful apparition; nothing is broken or misplaced.

One Headlight" So long ago, I don't remember when That's when they say I lost my only friend Well they said she died easy of a broken heart disease As I listened through the cemetery trees I seen the sun coming up at the funeral at dawn The long broken arm of human law Now it always seemed such a waste She always had a pretty face So I wondered how she hung around this place Hey, come on try a little Nothing is forever There's got to be something better than In the middle But me and Cinderella We put it all together We can drive it home With one headlight She said it's cold It feels like Independence Day And I can't break away from this parade But there's got to be an opening Somewhere here in front of me Through this maze of ugliness and greed And I seen the sun up ahead At the county line bridge Saying all is good and nothingness is dead We'd run until she's out of breath She ran until there's nothing left She hit the end, it's just her window ledge Hey, come on try a little Nothing is forever There's got to be something better than In the middle But me and Cinderella We put it all together We can drive it home With one headlight This place is old It feels just like a beat up truck I turn the engine, but the engine doesn't turn What smells of cheap wine and cigarettes This place is always such a mess Sometimes I think I'd like to watch it burn I'm so alone, I feel just like somebody else Man, I ain't changed, but I know I ain't the same But somewhere here in between the city walls of dying dreams I think her death it must be killing me Hey Hey Hey, come on try a little Nothing is forever There's got to be something better than In the middle But me and Cinderella We put it all together We can drive it home With one headlight The Wallflowers, Bringing Down the Horse (1996)

They're doing this because they haven't broken me. If I had lost my mind and sat weeping in my own shit, maybe then they'd be happy to send me to a madhouse like they did with Khaireh. But I stand and claim my innocence so they have to finish me to protect themselves. Their lies and evil end with me.' He had saved a cigarette to celebrate the reprieve, expecting. despite everything, that it would come through, but now he pulls it out from the foil and clasps it between his lips. He strikes a match against the wall. 'If only I could set fire to all your walls,' he says, inhaling deeply from the smouldering tobacco, 'I would burn this prison down and let everyone go free, whatever their crime, no one should steal their freedom. Somalis have got the right idea, you wrong someone and you're forced to look over your shoulder for the rest of your life unless you make amends. You deal with each other face to face. Only cowards live by prisons and cold hangings.

I missed the rest of the conversation because, while the good actor was carefully cooking his sentences with criticisms spiced with kindness, another member of the group, a young man who looked Chinese, with a face like raspberry jelly, stumbled up to me. His naturally yellow complexion was complemented by bright threads of broken veins, more purple than red. He had thick hair, a receding brow, jutting cheekbones, narrow eyes whose dark pupils seemed more polished than alive, a barely visible moustache the color of dead leaves, a little salt and pepper beard that was worn out like an old carpet, a long neck with an Adam’s apple stuck in it like a huge walnut, and shoulders like a scrawny old horse which did not fit with his thick, short chest and his pot belly. He was knock-kneed and bowed legged, with kneecaps shaped like coconuts. He also borrowed Doctor Magne’s chair, blew cigarette smoke out his nose, and took his turn to tackle me. His language was less elegant than the other two; it was hard for him to speak, which you could put down to shyness. He was dull and awkward. He seemed horribly unhappy and sorry to have come over, but there he was. He had to march on—and he did so heroically!—death in his soul. “Monsieur—finally yes!... Monsieur… I don’t like to jaw about brothers… absolutely not! But I have to tell you that Desbosquets is a lot more… absolutely… oh, I’ll blurt it out… a lot more… absolutely cracked than our friend Magne. Absolutely yes!” He wanted to be frank, to open up, which he constantly regretted, because he knew that he would be clumsy and mocked; he felt ridiculous and it was killing him. But his need for some honest self-indulgence gnawed at him, and he spit out his slang and his absolutelys—‘absolutely yes!’ and ‘absolutely no!’— which made him think he was revealing the deepest depths of his soul. He continued. “Maybe they told you about me—yes! I know: bing, bang —mechanics! Absolutely yes! A hack, they must have told you…” (Aha! I thought. So it’s my colleague the poet!) “…and the worst trouble, right? That’s Leonard—yes! Ah! When I’m a little…bing, bang…mechanics! I guess—grumpy—I don’t say… but there’s not an ounce of meanness in me! Disgusting, this awful problem with talking, but the mechanics, you know—because it’s the mechanics—no way! Do you want me to tell you my name? Ah! Totally unknown, my name, but don’t want them to mangle it mechanically when quoting it to you: Oswald Norbert Nigeot. Don’t say Numskull—no!—Although my verses!... Ah! Damned mechanics!... A bonehead, a stupid bonehead, bitten by the morbid mania to write—and the slander of the old students of the Polytechnic! Oh! To write! Terrible trade for the poorly gifted like me who are… bing, bang, not mechanics! And angry at the mechanics of words. Polytechnic pigs manufacture words; so, poor hacks can’t use them. Ah! Even this is mechanics!... And drunk on it, Desbosquets too, very drunk! Obviously you see it: Cusenier, Noilly-Prat, why not Pernod? It’s awful for people like him and me! See, you know— liquids are scarce—but thanks to the guards’ hatred of Bid’homme… and thanks to old Froin, too good, don’t believe in any bad—but can you call that bad? He lives with the Heaven of…mechanics…of…bang…of derangements, no! I want arrangements, not derangements!” Mr. Nigeot seemed very proud of having successfully (?) completed such a long sentence propped up by only one “bang” and one “mechanics,” but in spite of his satisfaction, he was scared of continuing less elegantly and he got all tangled up in a run of bizarre expressions in which the hated Polytechnicians and the bings and bangs (not to mention the absolutelys) got so out of hand that I could not understand a word of what he said.

Sparks had grown up in New Orleans and gone to sea in his twenties. He was a teetotaler, unusual in an Irishman. “Ah, but I dream of this stuff,” he said, gazing into the cup of milk before downing it in a cascade of voluptuous gulps. “I’ll crawl across broken glass for a cup of milk like an opium addict for a pipe.” “You might like opium better.” Sparks snorted. “It’s bad enough needing food and sleep and cigarettes, having to drag this fucking leg around. I can’t afford a habit like that.” “I’ve seen cripples in opium dens.” “Sure you have—trying to forget they’re cripples! How’s that for smarts—you’ve got a brace on your fucking leg and a monkey on your fucking back, and you think you’ve solved your fucking problem when all you’ve really done is stuck your head up your arse.” As Sparks shook the cup to catch the last drops of milk, Eddie was stricken with sympathy. To be a deviant and a cripple, without good looks or fortune or physical strength—how had Sparks managed to endure such a life? Yet he’d more than endured; he was ever cheerful.

Out of New York came a governor from the moneyed class, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and he drove Murray to fits—being from that hated family. (FDR’s cousin, Teddy, had forced Murray to remove a white supremacist plank from the Oklahoma constitution before he would allow it to join the union.) At first, Franklin Roosevelt was dismissed as a man without heft, a dilettante running on one of the nation’s great names. Then he took up the cause of the “forgotten man”—the broken farmer on the plains, the apple vendor in the city, the factory hand now hitting the rails. And though he spoke with an accent that sounded funny to anyone outside the mid-Atlantic states, and he seemed a bit jaunty with that cigarette holder, Roosevelt roused people with a blend of hope and outrage. He knew hardship and the kind of emotional panic that comes when your world collapses. He had been felled by double pneumonia in 1918, which nearly killed him, and polio in 1921, which left him partially paralyzed. He had been told time and again in the prime of his young adulthood that he had no future, that he would not walk again, that he might not live much longer. “If you spent two years in bed trying to wiggle your toe, after that anything would seem easy,” he said. Hoover believed the cure for the Depression was to prime the pump at the producer end, helping factories and business owners get up and running again. Goods would roll off the lines, prosperity would follow. Roosevelt said it made no sense to gin up the machines of production if people could not afford to buy what came out the factory door. “These unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten, the unorganized, the indispensable units of economic powers,” FDR said on April 7, 1932, in a radio speech that defined the central theme of his campaign. He called for faith “in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” That forgotten man was likely to be a person with prairie dirt under the fingernails. “How much do the shallow thinkers realize that approximately one half of our population, fifty or sixty million people, earn their living by farming or in small towns where existence immediately depends on farms?

I didn’t see clearly how you were right about the hypersexualization of this world. Men and women both chasing sex because they lack substance, because they lack personality, because they marinate in the old smelly sweat of one-night stands and broken hearts, they marinate in the fluids of bodies whose souls they have never met and whose eyes they have never looked into, their breath reeks of body fluids. They have cheapened sex and they have cheapened connection and bonding. Their breath stinks from cigarettes and alcohol and they have no idea how to make sweet love, they have no idea how to have a true orgasm. They have no idea how to love, they have no idea how to maintain a conversation beyond the repulsive small talk and the fakeness that reeks from their tongues.

For the rest, he had gingerish, curling hair and a square, masterful face that was no way impaired by a badly-broken nose. He looked tough, and immensely self-assured; it was in his glance, in the abrupt way he moved, in the slant of the long cigarette between his fingers, in the rakish tilt of his peaked cap, in the immaculate white tunic of the Imperial Guards. He was the kind who knew exactly what was what, where everything was, and precisely who was who—especially himself. He was probably a devil with women, admired by his superiors, hated by his rivals, and abjectly feared by his subordinates. One word summed him up: bastard.

In the haze of longing, a bittersweet twist, I never fathomed love's smoky eclipse, A day arrived, an unexpected shift, Kissing cigarette's filter, not your lips.

His unfiltered Camel crackled like a miniature campfire. He didn’t puff the cigarette so much as exorcise a demon from it. Five inhales and the thing was spent. Then he cracked open the window and in the rearview I saw it fly like a comet.

What these men are doing could become permanent.” “What do you mean?” Suddenly he looked weary. “You force people to stop asking questions, and before you know it they have auctioned off the question mark, or sold it for scrap. No boldness. No good ideas for fixing what’s broken in the land. Because if you happen to mention it’s broken, you are automatically disqualified.” “Surely that’s overstating it,” I said. “America runs on extremes. The latest craze and a tank of gas will get you about anywhere. Today the Kremlin is a messianic movement and you’re better dead than red. Tomorrow they’ll decide the real mischief is cigarettes and sugar in your coffee. The culture is built on hyperbole.” I wanted to see him smile. “Or maybe you really do think this food is worth yodeling about.

Amor Armada (The Sonnet) I don't do drugs, languages are my LSD. Half-lovers crave escape, I crave absolute unity. Music is my MDMA, Cultures, my cocaine. Languages are my LSD, People are my heaven. Those drunk on love, language and culture, need no artificial stimulant. Only the half-lovers and the half-dead, chase booze, drugs and institutions. I'm drunk with the spirit of sacrifice, You can keep your puny bottled charisma. In a world of broken glass and cigarette buds, I am Amor Armada.

I'm drunk with the spirit of sacrifice, You can keep your puny bottled charisma. In a world of broken glass and cigarette buds, I am Amor Armada.

I clean up messes. It’s what I do. I keep people calm, happy, and safe. I’m a balm to soothe panic and rage and bare feet pierced with broken glass. I’m a blanket of fog to cool a sofa burning from a lit cigarette.

The Bright Lights of Sarajevo After the hours that Sarajevans pass queuing with empty canisters of gas to get the refills they wheel home in prams, or queuing for the precious meagre grams of bread they’re rationed to each day, and often dodging snipers on the way, or struggling up sometimes eleven flights of stairs with water, then you’d think the nights of Sarajevo would be totally devoid of people walking streets Serb shells destroyed, but tonight in Sarajevo that’s just not the case The young go walking at stroller’s pace, black shapes impossible to mark as Muslim, Serb or Croat in such dark, in unlit streets you can’t distinguish who calls bread hjleb or hleb or calls it kruh. All take the evening air with stroller’s stride no torches guide them, but they don’t collide except as one of the flirtatious ploys when a girl’s dark shape is fancied by a boy’s. Then the tender radar of the tone of voice shows by its signals she approves his choice. Then match or lighter to a cigarette to check in her eyes if he’s made progress yet. And I see a pair who’ve certainly progressed beyond the tone of voice and match-flare test and he’s about, I think, to take her hand and lead her away from where they stand on two shell scars, where, in ‘92 Serb mortars massacred the breadshop queue and blood-dunked crusts of shredded bread lay on this pavement with the broken dead. And at their feet in holes made by the mortar that caused the massacre, now full of water from the rain that’s poured down half the day, though now even the smallest clouds have cleared away leaving the Sarajevo star-filled evening sky ideally bright and clear for bomber’s eye in those two rain-full shell-holes the boy sees fragments of the splintered Pleiades, sprinkled on those death-deep, death-dark wells splashed on the pavement by Serb mortar shells. The dark boy-shape leads dark girl-shape away to share one coffee in a candlelit café until the curfew, and he holds her hand behind AID flour-sacks refilled with sand

The Bright Lights of Sarajevo After the hours that Sarajevans pass queuing with empty canisters of gas to get the refills they wheel home in prams or queuing for the precious meagre grams of bread they’re rationed to each day, and often dodging snipers on the way, or struggling up sometimes eleven flights of stairs with water, then you’d think the nights of Sarajevo would be totally devoid of people walking streets Serb shells destroyed, but tonight in Sarajevo that’s just not the case – The young go walking at stroller’s pace black shapes impossible to mark as Muslim, Serb or Croat in such dark in unlit streets you can’t distinguish who calls bread hjleb or hleb or calls it kruh. All take the evening air with stroller’s stride no torches guide them, but they don’t collide except as one of the flirtatious ploys when a girl’s dark shape is fancied by a boy’s. Then the tender radar of the tone of voice shows by its signals she approves his choice. Then match or lighter to a cigarette to check in her eyes if he’s made progress yet. And I see a pair who’ve certainly progressed beyond the tone of voice and match-flare test and he’s about, I think, to take her hand and lead her away from where they stand on two shell scars, where, in 1992 Serb mortars massacred the breadshop queue and blood-dunked crusts of shredded bread lay on this pavement with the broken dead. And at their feet in holes made by the mortar that caused the massacre, now full of water from the rain that’s poured down half the day, though now even the smallest clouds have cleared away leaving the Sarajevo star-filled evening sky ideally bright and clear for bomber’s eye in those two rain-full shell-holes the boy sees fragments of the splintered Pleiades, sprinkled on those death-deep, death-dark wells splashed on the pavement by Serb mortar shells. The dark boy-shape leads dark girl-shape away to share one coffee in a candlelit café until the curfew, and he holds her hand behind AID flour-sacks refilled with sand.

The odour that pervaded the room was sickening. The sinister-looking man with the scar came in again and sniffed. I sniffed. Then the proprietor came in and sniffed. “Say,” I said in the toughest voice I could assume, “you got a leak. Wait. I seen the gas company wagon on the next block when I came in. I’ll get the man.” I dashed out and hurried up the street to the place where Kennedy was waiting impatiently. Rattling his tools, he followed me with apparent reluctance. As he entered the wine-shop he snorted, after the manner of gas-men, “Where’s de leak?” “You find-a da leak,” grunted Albano. “What-a you get-a you pay for? You want-a me do your work?” “Well, half a dozen o’ you wops get out o’ here, that’s all. D’youse all wanter be blown ter pieces wid dem pipes and cigarettes? Clear out,” growled Kennedy. They retreated precipitately, and Craig hastily opened his bag of tools. “Quick, Walter, shut the door and hold it,” exclaimed Craig, working rapidly. He unwrapped a little package and took out a round, flat disc-like thing of black vulcanised rubber. Jumping up on a table, he fixed it to the top of the reflector over the gas-jet. “Can you see that from the floor, Walter?” he asked under his breath. “No,” I replied, “not even when I know it is there.” Then he attached a couple of wires to it and led them across the ceiling toward the window, concealing them carefully by sticking them in the shadow of a beam. At the window he quickly attached the wires to the two that were dangling down from the roof and shoved them around out of sight. “We’ll have to trust that no one sees them,” he said. “That’s the best I can do at such short notice. I never saw a room so bare as this, anyway. There isn’t another place I could put that thing without its being seen.” We gathered up the broken glass of the gas drippings bottle, and I opened the door.

For two decades, our escape defined me. It dominated my personality and compelled my every decision. By college, half my life had led up to our escape and the other half was spent reliving it, in churches and retreats where my mother made it a hagiograpihc journey, on college applications where it was a plea, at sleepovers where it was entertainment, and in discussion groups after public viewings of xenophobic melodrama like China Cry and Not Without my Daughter, films about Christian women facing death and escaping to America. Our story was a sacred thread woven into my identity. Sometimes people asked, But don't a lot of Christians live there? or Couldn't your mother just say she was Muslim? It would take me a long time to get over those kinds of questions. They felt like a bad grade, like a criticism of my face and body...Once in an Oklahoma church, a woman said, "Well, I sure do get it. You came for a better life." I thought I'd pass out -- a better life? In Isfahan, we had yellow spray roses, a pool. A glass enclosure shot up through our living room, and inside that was a tree. I had a tree inside my house; I had the papery hand of Morvarid, my friend nanny, a ninety-year-old village woman; I had my grandmother's fruit leather and Hotel Koorosh schnitzels and sour cherries and orchards and a farm - life in Iran was a fairytale. In Oklahoma, we lived in an apartment complex for the destitute and disenfranchised. Life was a big gray parking lot with cigarette butts baking in oil puddles, slick children idling in the beating sun, teachers who couldn't do math. I dedicated my youth and every ounce of my magic to get out of there. A better life? The words lodged in my ear like grit. Gradually, all those retellings felt like pandering. The skeptics drew their conclusions based on details that I had provided them: my childhood dreams of Kit Kats and flawless bananas. My academic ambitions. I thought of how my first retelling was in an asylum office in Italy: how merciless that with the sweat and dust of escape still on our brows, we had to turn our ordeal into a good, persuasive story or risk being sent back. Then, after asylum was secured, we had to relive that story again and again, to earn our place, to calm casual skeptics. Every day of her new life, the refugee is asked to differentiate herself from the opportunist, the economic migrant... Why do the native-born perpetuate this distinction? Why harm the vulnerable with the threat of this stigma? ...To draw a line around a birthright, a privilege. Unlike economic migrants, refugees have no agency; they are no threat. Often, they are so broken, they beg to be remade into the image of the native. As recipients of magnanimity, they can be pitied. But if you are born in the Third World, and you dare to make a move before you are shattered, your dreams are suspicious. You are a carpetbagger, an opportunist, a thief. You are reaching above your station.

The Sonnets: XLI banging around in a cigarette she isn’t “in love” my dream a drink with Ira Hayes we discuss the code of the west my hands make love to my body when my arms are around you you never tell me your name and I am forced to write “belly” when I mean “love” Au revoir, scene! I waken, read, write long letters and wander restlessly when leaves are blowing my dream a crumpled horn in advance of the broken arm she murmurs of signs to her fingers weeps in the morning to waken so shackled with love Not me. I like to beat people up. My dream a white tree Ted Berrigan, The Sonnets (Penguin Books, 2000)

Hunter smoked a cigarette, his eyes drifting to Spaced, a British comedy, on the huge, flat-screen TV in front of us while fucking her. And they say guys are not good at multitasking.

Broken windows has poisoned relations between law enforcement and minorities, saddled untold poor with fines they can’t pay and also had fatal consequences, as in the case of Eric Garner, who died in 2014 while being arrested for allegedly selling loose cigarettes.

He brings the cigarette butt to his mouth and lights up. He breathes in, and coughs; a rattling helicopter with a broken blade crashing into a herd of trombone playing sheep falling off a cliff into a DIY shop with a discount on spanners.

Despite the cold outside, she was wearing a cropped white shirt and tight dark blue jeans that sat low, revealing a tattoo of a broken heart on her hip. Her hair was bleached white-blond with about an inch of silver-sprinkled dark roots showing. Her mascara had run and there were black streaks on her cheeks. She looked drip-dried, like she'd been walking in the rain, though there hadn't been rain for days. She smelled like cigarette smoke and river water.

They parked and entered the hospital through the emergency room. Taylor shuddered briefly as a woman on a gurney was rushed past. She’d been there once, and didn’t want to go back. She fingered her neck, a habit she’d broken along with her cigarettes. The scar was there, still in sharp relief across her throat. A suspect’s last gasp. She’d wear his desperation forever. She’d just gotten used to it. There was something about nearly losing your life—you either let it haunt you or you accepted that it had happened and moved on. She’d chosen the latter. She was perfectly content to be the one doing the killing, thank you very much, not being the one who someone had tried to kill. Being that kind of victim just didn’t work for her. As

we are born into this world on the tailcoats of a scream. born into gritted teeth and a shock of red across the pristine. born into a solemn hush. are you evil? you, who tore into this world on a steed of crimson… are you a monster? we are born as angels, toothless, a mouth a gurgling brook. and as we grow, so do our wings, until we are high enough to see that our church is no more than a small forest and the altar a tree. are you a monster, angel with fangs? all teeth, thick with teeth, you can’t even close your mouth anymore. it rains and it’s like drowning. corn husk skin and we’re born again. into a time of being tied down, to a person, to a bed. a time of clipped wings. of holy cries out to a void. your wildness a convenience store in the desert, pale pink, dusty, arid. your wildness staring longingly at the screaming horizon and flicking another cigarette butt into the dirt, a lone oscillating fan its only company. we’re born into this concrete world, where sanctuary is to be alone or to pretend to like it. this world of broken bottles instead of leaf crunch. roadside motels proclaiming vacancies. inside and out. that pluck your heartstrings. a new church, a fresh sin. the altar now a white railing against a muted matte pink wall. you lean against it, hips jutted to the side. some of the eighties still lingers. you see a man in a leather jacket kissing a girl’s neck purple. he looks up. teeth are everywhere. hundreds of glistening teeth. you turn away. your wings shush against an old telephone booth, door forced closed. you’re calling your mother to say you’re sorry for hurting her, but when she answers you hang up.

Smoking can’t be that bad for you: my grandfather smoked three packs of cigarettes a day and lived to be more than 100.’ Or: ‘Manhattan is really safe. I know someone who lives in the middle of the Village and he never locks his door. Not even when he goes on vacation, and his apartment has never been broken into.’ We use statements like these to try to prove something, but they actually prove nothing at all. When we speak like this, we succumb to the availability bias.

Yurik's room became their love nest. And a messier room the world had never seen. It was a jumble of dirty socks strewn about the floor, sheet music, CDs, cigarette butts, paper plates, and half-filled cans of Coke. An old Hammond organ, left behind by former tenants, stood in the hallway, blocking half the entrance and leaving only a narrow space to squeeze through. This was the room where the young couple broadened their knowledge of the world, from time to time ingesting substances that took them to other places and realities. But when Laura finished high school, and showed her parents the report card with grades that would never get her admitted into a decent college, she announced to Yurik that he had no prospects, and danced off forever. After leaving Yurik and giving him his first broken heart, she went to California. Then she flew off to the places where fearless and brainless enthusiasts of dangerous journeys fly to.

People who have no trouble advocating that cigarette commercials be banned from the airwaves on the grounds that they encourage young people to smoke should think again about the degree to which all people, and especially young people, take the media's well-crafted, market-tested messages to heart.

Later, they returned the body of Hamza al-Khatib.* He’s a cousin of mine and looks just like my son. He’d been tortured. They didn’t leave any spot on his body without cigarette burns. His body was full of stab marks and his neck was broken. They’d cut off his genitals.

Somewhere in that vast tapestry of interwoven odors, Angel was sure he could smell the dead. Not their bodies, but their souls. His newest theory was that the dead came as ghosts in sudden finger-thin wafts of perfume or cigarette or hair’s sweet soap scents when it was drying in the sun…

You’re not broken, Dot.” He stuck the cigarette in his mouth, patting my thigh offhandedly. “A little cut, sure. All diamonds are.