SMOKE, WRITTEN WELL THEN NOT

Startled, he stumbled away, scrambling both hands and feet to get back into the shadows. Smoke can’t follow to the shadows, he thought, squarely in the throes of cartoon-logic. Fright will do that, though, and what he saw in that cloud of exhaled smoke was frightening enough to push anyone into considering alternative rationales. But, cowering in a huddle around his cursed cigarette, he stole a peek over his shoulder to find nothing but the familiar struggle of the night’s darkness against the mellow haze of the docks. He slid around to sit with his back against the wall and took what he hoped to be a deep, relaxing breath.

That was why he came down here, after all: to relax on the docks, with their burned-out, dilapidated buildings and fuzzy sodium-lights; to smoke by the water in the ambiance of total failure, where his own complete lack of success looked dim by comparison. The place was a sepia-toned photograph, and each slippery step across the mildewed floorboards, each gentle lap of seawater, brought an appropriately-pungent mustiness that guided him into a fragile nostalgia that allowed him to escape himself, if only briefly.

But he was unable to escape that night. His mostly-untouched cigarette had burned down to the filter and, absently, as a matter of habit, he stole a final drag before crushing it under his heel. The smoke felt strange; he held it in his lungs, but there was discomfort in his belly, his chest, like the roiling bubbles of water brought to boil. A scalding jet climbed his neck until he less exhaled than unleashed a torrent of dense, black smoke into the salty air, a mass of acrid tendrils that coagulated into the very same horror that had earlier sent him scurrying to the shadows.

The black cloud spewed a noxious noise into the space between them, something malignant and foul but ultimately unintelligible, before the necessities of a face began to form—empty, angry eye-sockets chewed through the bilious mass and fell open with malice, while a wretched grin looked to have been slashed across its width with a crooked sickle. He tried to speak, but smoke was still being pulled from him, an endless rope of charcoal uncoiling in his belly and shoving out through his mouth like a fleeing animal.

“You really shouldn’t smoke,” the smoke rasped, still grinning viciously. “It’s just awful for you.”

He stared into the dirty cloud, shaking and sweating in his dread anticipation . . . and he did that for a while. Eventually, he shook himself steady and sweat himself dry, his terror slowly replaced with bewilderment. He ventured a quiet it’s definitely a bad habit, and the smoke seemed to nod.

“Mm-hm,” the smoke said, still nodding, still grinning, but leveling its gaze across the water. “I bet your insides look like a war zone.”

His face scrunched up involuntarily as he reassessed the situation, looking around for witnesses before checking his pulse, his temperature, his vision, his mental acuity, everything he could think of to check and finding nothing out of the ordinary.

“Seriously,” the smoke continued. “Your lung capacity must be really suboptimal.”

He said I mean, of course? and gathered himself, getting to his feet casually, less frightened than mildly annoyed.

“Well,” the smoke said. “Seeya round.”

But since his fortune had been foretold many paragraphs earlier, a harpoon hurled from somewhere in the deep reaches of space impaled him to the dock with a sound that resembled something sharp going through something meaty and into something like wood. As he slid down the harpoon that held him in place, his final thought was what an insultingly shitty way to end a story.

The end?

No, that’s absolutely the end. Let us never speak of this again.