Butt, wait

Everyone of them has a story to tell, but seldom do we ever stop to think about what they can tell us. It might seem queer to most to ponder a cigarette butt. But for such an omnipresent component of daily life, it serves as appropriate for the more inquisitive amongst us to stare for a while at these cylindrical castaways.

They can be found on any street corner in any city of any size. They are like dead leaves, rolling in mud or dust or water, thrown off in reckless abandon from the place from which they came. The wind blows them tightly together in alleys and the corners of buildings. They huddle upside-down in heavy glass ashtrays in dive bars and dingy coffee shops, or they make their own lonely sojourn down a no named street, helped along only by the wake of air conjured up by a passing car.

Some come in speckled brown, others in bright white. Some are ringed with a thin gold strip, others in a circumference of deep red. And like leaves or snowflakes, no cigarette butt is like another.
One might by stained with a heavy magenta coating that reveals the wrinkles in the lips that had pressed against it, tossed by a woman as she drove to a first date or had a smoke outside a bar with a no smoking rule or took a smoke break outside her office.

But I’d most like to believe that these butts made their way from the lips of a woman who was waking down the street, clad in a form fitting black dress, and propped up in five inch black heels that made the concrete pop as she walked on the sidewalk in a rhythm of intimidating femininity, her hair and breasts bouncing with each measured step. She smokes as she walks, head held high. She takes a drag, and pulls the cigarette quickly from her lips. She holds the cigarette between her right hand’s middle and index finger, attached to an arm that swings as she walks, like a pendulum gone awry. After five or six drags, she flicks the butt and a thin streak of smoke extends from the lit end into the air as it arcs toward the street, like a falling bomb. She walks away and the butt sits there, slowly smoldering, longing to be abused by her again.

Another might be crushed in an ashtray, smoked until the smoker’s throat was burned by the heat from the filter’s cotton. It lies there, twisted and degraded, like a used condom worn during a night that someone wants to forget about. These butts are usually the end product of thriftiness or anxiety. But I’d like to believe that they are the result of someone who was smoking alone at the end of a bar made of dark cherry wood.

The smoke-stained vertical blinds that hang in the bar’s only window cut the early afternoon sunlight into slats. An old man sits at the bar and lights a cigarette, inhales deeply, then spews a long stream of smoke from his lungs. The smoke moves from slat to slat, invisible in the void between them, then reappears in each measured light box before it seems to give up on itself, evaporating into the bar’s stained rectangular ceiling tiles. The light boxes elongate and thin as they move into the bar’s cramped expanse, like it doesn’t want to go any further. What would the point be? Even light can’t illuminate some places.

The old man’s droopy face oozes toward the bar’s top. He doesn’t put the cigarette down in the ashtray, instead it rests gently between his fingers, just inches from his right ear. He takes drags, and twists off the ash in the ashtray before placing the cigarette back in the initial position. When every last bit of tobacco has been burned away, he crushes the butt in the ashtray. It squeaks under the weight of his pushing as he moves it in quick half circles, putting out the frustration of his life with every twist.