They pass the cigarette between them with her scissors from work, the white cap still pinned in her hair, thinning like wisps of smoke, thinning like the white rolls of paper. Her son won’t play with me; I’m too young for his rough brand of 8-year-old gamesmanship; ships listing in my hands, made from plastic blocks and Lincoln Logs; Looking for treasure in the sea of brown shag. There’s a paper clip. I abandon my sailors and put the bounty into my mouth and chew on it til my gum bleeds. I press the end against my thumb, making a cone, like an antlion’s lair. The skin pops, like a set trap.
* * *
I don’t like to smoke when I can’t watch him roll the paper. He drops any number of powders and perfumes when I turn my back. Not liking, however, has never precluded the doing. Of the thing.
It burns the back of my throat, and I gave him a cross look, but we have both been working a long day at the warehouse, and I am now too tired to protest much. His best friends are there, and they prate on about a girl at the local Dairy Queen who keeps stopping by.
“Is she coming back tonight, dude?” they laugh. One tries to strum a few chords from a song that I think I recognize, but recognition of any kind now quickly fading as ability. I start towards him, to tell him it’s wrong, but one step sets the room spinning, and two drops stars from the lamp. Three turns me back the other way.
“I need some fresh air.”
Four separates the soul from my body and I am laying fully extended upon the carpet, never having made it to the door, where cut evening fescue wafts through the screen.
* * *
I mention it years later, as a way to break the ice, but our attitudes about it diverged like missionaries of competing gods, one ascetic and severe, the other indifferent. It’s a funny set of stories for me; and the reply of ‘you’ve been unconscious your life more than awake’ misleads me into thinking we’ve dipped our toes together into the cold water. But I’m alone suddenly, watching her walk up the bank, too weary of my irresponsible brand of quarter-life acceptance, and I’m only just now coming to terms with knowing I’ll never speak to her again, though we’re blood and miles aren’t such a difficult thing to cross.