ask the price

By David Hobman
The flash of the lighter leaves a momentary flare in my eyes as I blink. The grating sound of the striker drawn across the flint creating fire, giving a subconscious primal satisfaction. The red orange and yellow flame dances in front of my eyes for a moment before I bring it up to gently kiss my cigarette. The pleasing sound of snapping and crackling as the tobacco burns comes softly to my ear as I draw on the cigarette. Inhaling deeply to appease and silence the screaming demons of addiction pulling on their barbed threads woven deeply in to my mind. Exhaling smoke, momentarily distracted by the forms the smoke takes curling into the air, some dropping like sand dropped into water, more snaking up in tendrils, dissipating, not seen again.

The red eye burns angrily as I pull another lung full of smoke into my body further quieting the habit that in truth is suicide, a slow suicide. Denial comes forward in my mind as I tell myself I will quit before it gets me. It’s heavily tinged with a gut feeling louder now after years of protest. It says “No you won’t“ and asks: Is it already too late? Then it shouts “Weak fool,” before being stifled by another lungful of cigarette smoke. The red eye taking on a disconcerting glare, the once snow-white paper now stained with ugly yellow brown nicotine veins running down the cigarette toward me, ever closer with every drawing of the now-bitter smoke.

As my suicide weapon burns past half-way, the taste of the smoke that at first was craved has become the very flavour of death itself. Rejected by mouth and lung, heavy in my stomach... and yet I smoke on to remain staunch in my habit, in my addiction, in my weakness and foolishness. I again drag in another lungful of smoke, committing suicide for reasons I’ve forgotten, reasons a boy once had, that for him were real and good maybe even important. Picking up the packet, handing coin to a man, but never asking the price. Now the boy has gone and his reasons with him. The price has become all too clear as I stub out another cigarette.

Image copyright David Hobman, all rights reserved.