The hearts and minds and the souls of so many millions, maybe billions, have been altered in the quick and light exercise. It was simple: pick it up, raise the white, cylindrical stick to your lips, insert, and then, when all the other factors had been achieved, add a burst of controlled fire to the end of the stick and, with one deep inhalation, suck the warm smoke and all of its pleasure inducing nutrients down, down, down into the lungs. Now, hold. Wait for the smoke to carry the droplets of nicotine rain to the parched, landscape of lungs, until each droplet splashes and settles against the interlining of the lungs and melds with that tissue and, with no delay, be absorbed into the blood stream where it finds the 'feel good gland' and chokes the gland until it releases its precious treasure trove of endorphins. Those endorphins lay over the brain like a nice blanket until, for a moment, all troubles melt away and you exhale. The white smoke dances and cascades up into a thin fog of dispersing strings, slowly bending and changing and morphing with all the laziness and eloquence of distant a cirrus being nudged across the sky by a high pressure front.
It laid on the table with no real purpose; except to taunt.
Kate had left with he kids two days ago, 'and not too soon' he thought. The constant bickering and yelling had turned a souring marriage into a relationship where condescension could be found - with little effort - behind the flour in the pantry; low voices of displeasure, and their adverbs, hid in the crevices between the refrigerator and counter at a low enough frequency to be out of the children's hearing range but, a smart child would have noticed that daddy would flat out ignore mommy and then shoot her a look which meant that spankings where close at hand. Of course there were no 'spankings'... at first. Kate was no one's punching bag and she was sure to make Bruce aware of that fact on the day she left. He didn't know what would become of the their marriage. It was all left in Kate's hands.
And then there was downsizing. Downsizing was the popular term for it in the 90's and 2000's. However, the phrase 'getting fired' somehow seemed to fully explain what had happened. He knew that he was arriving to late for work long after the warnings from his supervisor stopped. But, it was easy to come in late without anyone watching. And after so many years at any job, there comes a comfortability factor that isn't measured by any skills test administered by the department of labor. 'Shouldn't they just know that I'm capable of doing my best when my best is needed?'Bruce had pondered that often on the way to the unemployment agency. The agency had a total of eleven jobs posted on the board on Monday: Two companies sought truck drivers, five sought computer software developers, and the last three... did they even matter? "Fast food! Are they kidding?" He remembered those words falling from his lips as he slapped on his third nicotine patch of the day, followed by the thought, 'I need a smoke, bad! The fast food job was starting to gain appeal'; at least it would pay something. He hadn't worked in two months and their savings, what they had set aside for a house, was a carton of cigarettes away from being empty.
Bruce recalled the kids screaming as Kate drug them through the threshold; as though they instinctively knew that their parents marriage had failed. That image played repeatedly in Bruce's head like a scratched record. They wanted their daddy, he knew, but what could he do? "Women don't have egos so, they can just pack the fuck up and go back to mom and dad's!" He yelled and threw a wadded up application at the window with a little extra anger added to its flight; almost hoping that the mere force of the throw would shatter the glass. If it had, It would've been a cool story to tell, anyway. "Not us. We've got this fucking -," He slapped his thin chest through the dress shirt and loosened tie. "Macho shit going on." The kitchen table was entirely covered with applications except for a spot with the half full coffee cup. He saw it, thought back to when it was made and took a sip. 'Still good. This would be nice with a -,'.
The cigarette, the only cigarette in the house, the cigarette he wanted to keep so that when he finally quit, like the third and all prior boxes of the nicotine patches promised, he could slide it behind his ear as a good luck charm when playing poker, looked almost feminine. His mouth started to water as the cigarette silently beaconed him, "Come on, Buddy. One puff." The muffled sound of the air conditioning unit coming to life, pressed against his ear drums and the tiniest gust of air from the over head vents, pushed the cigarette over a grain of salt, or something, and sent the perfectly straight stick rolling to within an inch of his right hand. It stopped. But the fact that it moved at all surprised Bruce and, for no more than a moment, made him forget about the stresses that laid on his shoulders. His eyes traveled over to his left hand as his entire oral cavity began to ache and hunger for the deliciousness the cigarette had to offer.
