Short Story #476

Once again, I find myself alone on these same cold steps, clutching the same cigarette smoldering between these same two fingers. It never changes. You work long hours into the dead of the night, just to cook the same shit food for the same bunch of drunken scumbags and low-life who are just as miserable as yourself. Or at least that's the world I know. I look out from the back steps at the alley that has become more familiar to me than my own face. Hundreds of cigarette butts cover what's left of the cracked and crumbling pavement. I count them, sometimes, on an exceedingly slow night, never reaching more than 200 before my cigarette is ashed and I have to start all over. But I never feel lonely. My cigarette keeps me company. I think it knows it too. It seems to reach out and embrace me as the gentle plumes of gray drift lazily around my hand, up, past my face. I bring it up to my lips, savoring the last few seconds of its existence, before banishing it into the sea of its extinguished brethren. As I turn back inside, I take one final glance as the last slender plume rises up and vanishes into the night sky.