~ Background: I saw a man in NYC while walking on 32nd and Park. He quite literally looked like a walking cigarette which inspired this short character story.

The walking cigarette conjured up flame after flame in a desperate attempt to ignite the holy trinity. To project his sponge-like mind and body into the far reaching distances of the 3rd dimension and onward. Possibly even passing into another plane of existence with just a single puff, and for only a brief moment.

His mustache stayed glued on to his upper lip and moved every which way his stiff lips decided to curl to.

An odd coloring in physical appearance from a distance. Decaying tar and nicotine flowered from his cells giving him a grayish hue. A skin tone I had never seen before.

His gaze was fixed: straight ahead as if a string in the distance in front of him was tied into the back of his skull and with taut tension pulled him ahead. The rest of his body responded accordingly. Head leading, followed by his shoulders, then his chest, pelvis, knees, and leading last his feet, as if in a constant state of falling forward. The only thing holding him up; the invisible string.

His gaze was something I had never seen before to such a degree.

It was as if it were fixed upon a memory he had conjured up in his head.

Parts of the past constructing images he used to propel himself forward towards an imagined set of circumstances he was pre-planning in his head.

Perhaps the obligatory come to terms with the immediate present, but only briefly for self-preservation purposes and held for enough time to avoid immediate danger. Then, a quick slip back into the nethersphere of clouded conjurations of mental images.

He held a shoulder bag, the contents of it unknown. Perhaps papers deemed necessary by the occupation he was using as a crutch for security, covered in ash and bits of processed food. It was my intuition that highlighted his shoulder bag, and led me to an understanding that this shoulder bag was a piece of the puzzle as to how this walking cigarette became one in the first place.

The determination to find the end of the string caused the cigarette to move with such brazen speed, beads of cloudy sweat seeped from his pores. The beads were embalmed with formaldehyde and other chemicals that bound them together like microscopic children playing red-rover in clusters of millions around a crowded community pool.
The occasional swipe of his gray smoke-covered hand swept the beads away in an effort to avoid contaminating the vision of his fixed gaze.

He held a cigarette in the other hand. “How odd,” I thought. “A cigarette smoking a cigarette.” Cannibalism clearly not an issue for this butt. I dare not say a word. Simply observe this phenomenon.

The drag took what seemed like eons. In the time he enclosed his lips around the butt it grew roots and stitched itself into his leathery skin. He yanked the cigarette out of his mouth, and the sound emanated through the gelatinous ether and punched my eardrum. The pop of the stitching of the cigarette breaking away from the cigarette's mouth was enough to make me flinch at the pain it must have endured.

But the cigarette made no visible wince at the dislodging of his smoke stick.

An eel-like smoke slithered out of his mouth but was quickly sucked back in. It was as if an invisible hand created by what little alveoli he had left reached out and snatched the eel to bring it back to the depths of the underworld. There, it was molecularly fragmented and dispersed to the famished demons of the devils lair.

And then, a slight visible release of tension coming from the cigarette's forehead. Enough to make his brow droop on top of the invisible string like a cabana laying itself on a support beam.

The destiny of the walking cigarette will never be known. My hope is that the string is never broken, for if it is, the walking cigarette will inevitably consume itself.