A quote: “Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spent the rest of the day putting the pieces together.” ~~ Ray Bradbury

I’ll start with a story …

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1977. He stopped for gas off the highway, buying a pack of cigarettes though he had quit a year before to please Sarah. He walked across the two-lane blacktop to chase that cigarette with a beer inside a roadhouse that advertised it “ice cold”.

She was near the end of the bar, bright eyes, a smile that pulled to one side. She moved next to him as he opened the pack and shook out a cigarette for himself then offered her one. In five minutes they told each other their lives’ stories and when she said, “let’s get out of here” they walked out to his car and chased the sunset.

They parked near a field, laying on the trunk to watch the stars come out wreathed in smoke. Cigarettes measured their time as the night went on, a tangle of jeans and legs and calls to the sky, her hair spread across his jacket he laid out for her.

As dawn pinked the sky, they shared the last one from the pack. He drove her back to her car and she didn’t look back as she got into it.

2026. 52 years of marriage that had weathered everything but cancer. Sarah had made these walls home and now … he was in the attic, looking at a lifetime of memories and saw his old jacket on a rack. He reached into a pocket, pulled out an empty cigarette pack and blinked at the flood of memory. What happened to her? What had been her life? Was she still alive?

He looked around at decades of other memories. Love wasn’t always easy, but he hoped one pack of smokes was the worst Sarah thought of him.

He crumpled the pack and let it fall to the floor.

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Now, it’s your turn.
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. featured image, cropped, Adobe stock standard license

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