Margaret’s daughter, Siobhan, was a young, free-spirited sort of woman with too many friends and not enough things to do with them. She was defiantly pretty, in the way a mutt is pretty without being allowed to participate in Pedigree or Kennel Club bitch beauty pageants. Her blue eyes were like a child’s – wide and round and magnified a size and a half too large for her head, with long lashes that combed her bushy brown eyebrows. Her eyes had bags under them from a blend of school and her work as a stock girl in the spice aisle of an uppity gourmet supermarket. She was a caged bird; not a dove, but not a crow either. Perhaps a thrush or even a pigeon. She spent her time avoiding her parents and studying alternative music with sickeningly romantic lyrics. Some of the best songs had the most terrible words. But they did have minor augmented chords and half diminished thirteens and the most absurd tensions. Siobhan could not play guitar. She could figure out block chords on her eight hundred dollar Yamaha keyboard and play them in succession, but she left the actual music part to her audiophilic friends.
Siobhan was on the porch smoking down a pack of grape Swisher Sweets. Cheap blunts were her specialty; she loved the taste of artificially-flavored cancer. Her big eyes were not especially blue today, but then again neither was the sky. The snow-spawning clouds invaded her irises and filled them to the brim with a dull navy-gray, which only turned their impish size into those of a vintage doll, glassy and marble-like against her porcelain-painted skin. She smelled, as she always did, like copious amounts of various exotic varieties of different spices: Madagascar bourbon vanilla and pure aniseed were her favorite. At work she opened the aesthetic jars and took a pinch when no one was looking and rubbed it on her wrists. Spice had more character than Lovespell or Can-Can. It was a conversation starter, anyway.
It was a rather cold day. The snow – much less snow than white sheets of half-melting ice which were flowing glacially into the abandoned street below, picking up mud and dead grass from Mortimer’s tire tracks and spreading it haphazardly in eyeliner-streaks down the hill – was preparing its surface for another wave of precipitation; by the look of the pregnant, bulging winter clouds above her, it would start any moment now.
Why the FUCK wasn’t there any cell reception in the mountains by now?! The year 2010 was coming fast; the least society could have done was expanded to the more rural denizens. Duhring did have actual residents, after all. Why should they be denied the same luxuries as the more culturally up-to-date?
Siobhan lit her third blunt and sat down on the snow-soaked loveseat. She was hung-over. By her right foot sat a box of stale saltine crackers, from which she grabbed a handful and bitterly shoved a few in her mouth, taking the moment to ash her cigarillo. Drunkenness was not her favorite state of being. She preferred tobacco to anything, especially the middle-eastern variety, and weed was okay when she could get it. She liked the taste of vodka and she had been raised on wine (gradually diluted less and less by her grandfather), but too much made her murderously miserable. If there is anything worse than being a drunk, it is being an unhappy one.
In fact, Siobhan did not drink enough to alter her perception at all if she could manage it. She wouldn’t have touched more than a light beer last night if it hadn’t been for Paul, her ex-fiancé, forcing his way back into her life. She had been able to successfully forget him for the past three months; it was not until now that he had been able to get to her. Breakdowns are rarely graceful, unless executed by Audrey Hepburn or Kate Winslet, and that certainly rang true for Siobhan, who immediately got shitfaced and began swapping saliva with total strangers, most of whom were gay. Upon the midnight falling-out with her fiancé, she had reached for her cell phone, a bottle of spiced rum, and a twisty-straw, and sobbed incoherently to Nolan and Luna for an hour and a half. Nolan had not been much help, but then again he had probably been drunk too. Luna had listened patiently and intently and did the best she could to calm Siobhan down enough to reason with her about the evil Paul, whom she had dubbed the Cruel Overlord of Adultery.
Phoebe drove Siobhan home. Phoebe did not drink. She did not smoke weed, and she was too sensitive to tobacco to smoke that either. Phoebe was highly disapproving of any form of vice, except of course sex. She had been in the practice of mothering babbling, boozed idiots for a half decade on account of her late husband Eoghan, whose many addictions were not limited to beer and cigarettes. If she had learned anything from Eoghan, it was to remain absolutely silent. Siobhan knew that she was angry, so she stayed quiet too, and resigned to wiping off her makeup before the waterworks started. It didn’t take two steps past the threshold of the house. As she was shedding her coat, and her hat, and her scarf, and her gloves, Phoebe asked if she needed anything. She responded by collapsing in her arms and wailing like the sick puppy she was. Phoebe made her go to bed, and returned with a piece of herbed toast (with pure aniseed), a dark chocolate truffle (with a Madagascar bourbon vanilla center), and a piping hot cup of Tension Tamer to calm her nerves.
It was at this time that she had begun her cellular tirade on the eardrums of Nolan and Luna. Nolan tried to listen, but ultimately changed the subject. He greatly valued his own sanity, and such conversations with a drunk friend-plus-benefits were not entirely beneficial mentally. She appreciated his effort; she thought it was cute that he tried to get her mind off of the subject. He was actually getting his own mind off of her. Luna allowed herself to get personally involved so that Siobhan would not have to, called up the sonofabitch, and verbally castrated him. The Tension Tamer kicked in around that time. Tension Tamer was liquid hookah. Phoebe was mini-mother. Siobhan slept heavily on someone else’s bed. She woke up at 4 a.m. hungry as fuck.
That was why Siobhan was smoking her life a few hours shorter on this cold day. She had slept for the entire northward drive, awakening briefly only to pop some aspirin and eat a fast food breakfast. (Hold the onions, extra cholesterol, please.) Margaret was inside, and so were Phoebe and Luna. Innocent Margaret pointed out that something smelled peculiar. Phoebe choked and left the room. Luna knew the smell of Swishers all too well, but kept her mouth shut, for all Margaret’s other suspicions about her daughter would somehow be confirmed if she could verify that she smoked. That isn’t to say all the suspicions weren’t absolutely true. Margaret suspected a lot about her daughter about which she kept her lips tightly pursed. She did not know much at all about any of her relationships, and she even knew very little about Paul, except that he had long ago been Siobhan’s boss and that they both quit their jobs in order to be together. Therefore she knew nothing about her daughter’s sex life – which, of course, she always hoped half-optimistically was non-existent. As far as Margaret was concerned, Siobhan was ready to tell her anything that might happen in her life, and seeing as Siobhan never told her anything, she was leading a pretty decent one. She figured her daughter was repulsed by drugs and had a strong conviction concerning the role sex played in relationships.
Siobhan finished her pack in a record fifty minutes. She had taken a short stroll through the desolate campground, dragging sticks through the deep parts of the half- frozen swamps to wake up the hibernating frogs and toads under the surface. No one in the cabin would have enjoyed one blunt with her, and she was perfectly fine with that. It is one thing to enjoy a blunt with friends. That is when one has deep conversations and gets to know people, and depending on who one is with, it can lead to some pretty interesting topics and potentially to some mild sexual activity in the back of a pickup truck. But enjoying a blunt on one’s own is a twisted sort of meditation. Smoke has a way of clearing one’s mind by simply clouding it up. It clogs the unnecessary thoughts and chokes them and somehow has the wisdom to keep the important thoughts clean. Siobhan did not entirely believe this, but the thought came to her as she was walking.
Anyway, tobacco was supposed to be relaxing, right? She never inhaled all the way more than once per blunt, because it made her cough. Her lungs were quite more used to shisha and Virginia Slims and other smoky substances, that the queer pureness of the cheap cigarillo excited her nerves too much.
She had enjoyed the first Swisher of this pack down at the swimming hole with her dog, Carmen, chasing invisible sprites around the thick ice which stifled the usually rushing waters of Pine Creek. The monochrome of the ice and snow and gray, rolling clouds made it unreal enough that no thoughts needed insult her relaxation. At that point, Luna had been off somewhere taking pictures of the snow-covered branches and broken ice and dogs and General Winter’s ambush on Northern Pennsylvania. She had abandoned Siobhan at the creek to chase a windstorm whose breath blew the forest’s new cover into a snowy maelstrom around her. That is where she began thinking of the art of smoking solitaire.
Smokers smoke for any variety of reasons, obviously. Kids smoke because they think it’s cool. Women smoke because it brings them at level with men. Men smoke because it makes them more animal than they already are. Social butterflies smoke to make more friends who smoke, teenagers smoke to disobey. Loners smoke because they’re alone. Some people smoke for fun, be it social or masochistic, some people smoke to punish themselves. Alaska smokes to die. Old men smoke because it’s what they did when they were young men. Young men smoke because they hang out with too many old men. That’s all cigarettes, of course. Once you get into things like straight tobacco and other potentially harmful lung-steams a whole new slough of reasons surfaces. Siobhan made a mental note to recount them to… someone. Nolan would listen, but he was not a camper. Nolan was probably presently smoking as well back home in the jolly Christmas suburbs, where the snow forgot to fall on the roads and the cold was abolished once you went inside. Nolan smoked blunts almost more regularly than Siobhan. He also smoked weed. Nolan smoked because it wasn’t as scary as dropping LSD. Nolan smoked because he was a musician, and all the good musicians smoked. Tom Waits smoked. Tom Waits was a good musician.
Siobhan smoked because…. Because she was Siobhan. She smoked because she didn’t know a good enough reason yet not to. Cancer didn’t scare her; she had a family history of it but it was comprised solely of survivors. She didn’t value her voice musically, others did that for her. All she valued were her fingers. And what would smoking do to them? Burn them, perhaps. She had certainly burnt herself many a time. But it had never done any permanent damage. In fact, a glissando was much more possible on her heavy-weighted keys now than ever since she had burned her pointer on a hookah bowl. The scar ran the outside length of the finger, and had calloused so well that it was tough as leather.
