The Paper Cigarette

Something was churning in that head of his.

A speckled canvas had been smeared in his face.

The axle of his shoulders loomed forward, as if a thread had been pulled out of him. He was chiseled and spawn from the murderous population of Ellis County.

And he was well aware of his place in it.

He had leaned against the entrance of The Paper—it was early and Mr. Hem was not there yet—His trousers were dirty. His T was white and soiled with dirt from the red canvas and in his back pocket were four paper cigarettes rolled with newspaper print.

They struck out toward the oak and landed there.

The events of the Brahma’s death were yet in their faces. They were hooked and baited. They shielded their eyes from the early heat and were dirty, Mars-like, their ears pinned forward and in those faces of yellow and brown and red-haired boys was a wedge of cruelty. For there were few people dispersing about the town.

Nook had not come.

They drew images in the dust.

They were speckled and hatched from the sperm of a horizontal lane. The early sun was in their eyes and hair and faces and each would turn to the other, occasionally, and comment about how hot it was out there. They were musty.

One sensed that.

Two people were drawn there in the dust. A woman with breasts and pubic hair, dotted with the edge of their fingertips, dotted upon her vagina, and the second image of a man with his penis stiffened, and they had failed, but tried, to draw them consummately, one of them coughing into his hand, his weight on his elbow, until they turned away from the images, the brick-haired child mortified, and onto the outer layer of the sperm.

The oldest wanted a paper cigarette, said he had had a taste for it.

The matchbox shaped the remaining pocket of his trousers. And there was a woman on it with her legs crossed, I could see her faintly. She was blonde and her arms were bridled behind her head. One of her feet, pale and skeletal, tipped its edge.

He looked at it and grinned.

He was hieroglyphic.

He spat in his hand and ran his fingers through his hair. He looked around him, at me, and retrieved a paper cigarette from his back pocket. An element of oxygen filtered through his lungs the sudden, impenetrable echo of crystallization.

His lung had come from another lung and that lung had come from another and he was the fetus, trapped inside of the hereditary, invisible globe, the smoke rising through the Universe of the round incubator, and into the umbilical cord.

If one ever wants to witness, or chooses, s/he can, what results, although it can be dangerous, a hypothesis can produce. One can, indeed, be sitting on a train with a pregnant smoker one minute, free with mobility, and find himself lurking in the barred window of a cell with those brief encounters escalating in his mind, however temporary.

The smoke from the paper cigarette had burned his eyes.

He rubbed them, his mouth ajar.

He looked down at the son nearest him and demanded that he walk like a queer and the Others clapped and clapped and clapped and the line was repeated, Walk like a queer, and one of them chanted above the clapping about Hill and Shelby Garrett, about how they had taken it up the rear, how he wished, he wished they were not dead, if they were not dead, he yelled, he would catch them and beat the shit out of them.

That’s what they get, yelled another.

And thus, the paper elephant was fluttering between them, it was there fluttering in the blood and burn and I was shielding my head from the blows, crest-fallen upon the dirt road with their fathers and Others kicking and kicking and kicking me in the gut.

The son had put his hand on his hip and mimicked and mocked through the clapping with his wrist down...