Challenge
Up In Smoke: Craft a shortstory, drabble, vignette, or poem that features, includes, or describes the act of smoking.
As a literary device, I love cigarettes. As a real-world item, I hate them. They stink. They're expensive. They're addictive.
In film or a piece of writing, though, they're silent characters with souls of their own. I love the smoky exhalation, the expectant inhale. I'm amazed at those white tendrils, reaching skyward, or the plume expelled into a face by an antagonist.
I love the words and images surrounding smoking.
We can twist the act any way we want. Build suspense. Create tension, or relieve it. Even find humor in the weakness of the addiction.
Let me see your spin on it.
Nonfiction—A Cigarette
A cigarette on the beach:
Cold,
Light-headed,
Salty,
Composed.
You inhale with the coming of the waves;
You breathe out as they slip away.
The drowsiness you feel is the cooling of the earth
as it spins through a universe of cold, salty thoughts.
The embers in the stub are little suns.
You flick away a shooting star
and know at once how small you are.
[Wrote this, hmm, must have been 2010, mid-way through college]