Miriam Kotzin
Smoke
He hasn't stopped smoking yet, but he has told everyone that he's going to
stop, and that’s almost as bad. He knows that lighting up now is considered a
visible act of moral failure, of weakness so profound that if he were another
sort of fellow he would feel guilty.
He wants a cigarette, though it's too late in the day to get the satisfying
click in the lungs. Now he wants the comfort of habitual actions to carry him
through this conversation. He fumbles in his jacket pocket until his fingers
meet the smooth metal of the gold monogrammed cigarette case she gave him.
She told him she'd discovered it in an antique store
and then presented it
to him like found treasure.
“I thought you gave up smoking,” she says. She turns in her seat to signal
to the waiter who is hovering over a nearby table.
“I said I was thinking about giving up smoking.” The flame dances at the tip of
the cigarette. In a moment he’ll inhale and drop the dead match in the ashtray.
He looks at the cigarette, its smoke scrawling upwards
in curls and dashes that
he imagines are marvelous revelations written in a language he failed to
learn as a child. “And," he says, "I am."
She raises a single eyebrow and shifts in her seat. The waiter has
disappeared into the kitchen. She sits watching for his reappearance.
“Another late night, darling?” he asks and stubs out the cigarette. He snaps
open
the case to light a second.
“The project should be finished soon.” A single dimple appears on her left
cheek.
“And then we can do anything we want.”
He taps the cigarette lightly on the table, an old habit. “This weekend...”
He inhales
deeply, knocks the ash off into the ashtray.
“Nothing would please me more,” she says. Her words and even her tone are
honey. Only someone who knows her well would recognize the tell, the dimple she
has when she lies.
She told him about the tell herself, when their relationship was fresh and a
lie unimaginable. For months he’s been seeing the dimple; for months he’s kept
silent, preferring to watch and learn. After all, he knows he has nothing really
to lose.
o0o o0o o0o o0o
o0o o0o
Journey
Becca is tired now. It has
been a long day’s walk from where the train had left
her, no real station, just a wooden platform with nothing around it but meadows
and beyond the meadows tree-covered hills. She carries her new shoes in one
hand and a small gray striped suitcase in the other. She is happy that she
hadn’t minded leaving so much behind. As it is, the suitcase is all she can
manage.
The road here is not much more than ruts in the ground, and white stone showing
through where wagon wheels have worn away the grass. When she stops, she can
hear the sound water makes falling onto rocks. Might be, Becca thinks, that
she could get something to drink there or could even stop a while longer and
stand in the stream--if it is a stream she hears and not a swift-flowing river.
Such a river would be of no use to her now.
Up ahead a pine grove shades the road, and then road vanishes in the woods. All
Becca hears is the hum of her own blood in her head, the hum louder than the
water rushing, louder than the thrush song, louder than the wind in the pine
boughs. If the road ends here, then she is certainly lost, without hope
of
making it to the cabin before nightfall.
She reaches the grove and stands on the fallen brown needles that cushion the
path. She will have to sit here and rest a bit. She spreads her striped skirt
beneath her. Gradually she hears the wind again, and the water, and the hidden
birds calling to one another, and then from where she thought there was no road
comes the deep voice of a man calling to his horses and the scree of a wagon
carrying a heavy load.
She will be all right after all. She is on the road that leads somewhere. And
if she doesn’t reach the cabin before nightfall, well, she tells herself, that
will be all right, too.