A Stick to do the Trick

A beautiful girl of about fifteen sat quietly in the living room. On the table in front of her was a half finished pack of Marlboro Lites. Drag after drag, exhalations after inhalations, she went on sucking the stick between her fingers, her image continuously obscured by the white puffs floating around her head. There were lines on her young face seemingly freshly painted, like two minutes ago they weren't there. She swung her head back then, rather slowly, creating a soft thud once it fell in contact with the back of the chair. She turned the TV on and found an old movie starring Alec Guinness. After a while, she decided to stare out the window, where apparently the happenings were much more interesting.

The phone rang just then. The rings echoed through the hall leading to the bedroom. Three rings came and went before she picked it up. A strained voice rose up from the other end, its familiarity peacefully cracking open. It was her boyfriend's mother in an escalated state of frenzy. And judging from her stutters, she was also trembling. The girl tried to calm her down but each time she offered a soothing phrase, she would begin muttering in incoherent snatches. It wasn't until somebody from the other end came to the rescue that the mother's hysterics subsided and her intentions for phoning brought to the limelight.

"He's dead." No wonder she was in such a tizzy.

She put the phone down. All afternon she'd been biding her time, awfully waiting for something out of this world, something entirely enchanting, to happen. She had been a little naive to expect to hear of the world's ending and a little too arrogant. Disappointed then that what'd come to her fell short of global destruction, she glided her way to her bedroom. Inside, the sunlight crawled to her bed, like a swarm of locusts on a field. She hustled herself onto it, refusing to cry, to surrender, to break down and get lost. Then she clicked her lighter open and picked up from where she left off.