Puffs for the past
Marianne hunched her back and stuck her head in under the kitchen fan to score a puff off her cigarette. The movement felt second nature, embedded as it probably was in her muscle memory, despite it being the first time she did it in decades.
She never smoked inside anymore; in fact, she didn’t smoke anymore, having quit the habit with relative ease more than fifteen years ago, except occasionally on Fridays during the hours immediately following the work week’s end, cooling off in some bar with the usual crowd and feeling like so many ‘fuck it’. The truth to tell, she rarely spent time in the kitchen anymore either, smoking or otherwise, and certainly not by the stove; boiling water for tea was about as much action as it had seen on most days lately, or actually for as long as she ever looked back on any given day of her current way of life. It was however what she had used to do, smoking in the kitchen, that is, back then, for hours on end, exactly like that with one elbow on the counter and the hand in under the fan, yapping away with some wife from down the hall while eventually watching some sadly uninspired and uncomplicated dish just barely take form in time for her husband’s arrival.
It wasn’t nostalgia she felt as she stood there; it’s hard to be nostalgic over feelings of desperate apathy, but it did bring back a cascade of memories, and not all of them were bad. It’s funny how it did that seeing that it wasn’t the same stove, or the same kitchen, or indeed the same apartment; the kitchen fan itself could almost not have been more different and her newer, expensive, one in celebrated Danish design could probably have handled the smoke from one lousy cigarette with her simply standing normally somewhere in its vicinity. In fact, the big, lofty, sun showered apartment itself would probably have allowed for the occasional indoor cigarette, in any room she pleased, without the odour festering.
No, it was in honour that she stood there, of her late ex-husband, and it was, she figured, the least she could do seeing as he lay there beside her, dead on the floor, the barely used Japanese fish knife proving itself to be more than sharp enough to pass through his rib cage and into his heart.
