20080213

Quitter

by Rachel Green

Winston took a long drag of his herbal cigarette holding the smoke in his lungs while it leached stress from his blood, then letting it all out in one long, controlled exhalation toward the night sky. He looked down again at the glowing tip, rolling the joint in his fingers and feeling where one of the skins was peeling away and shook his head. He passed it to Sam, a younger man with the folly of youth tattooed on his arms and knuckles and its stupidity marked by the beanie hat rammed onto greasy blond spikes. Sam took it and inhaled quickly; staccato drags that implied he wasn't taking it in and was just smoking to be sociable with his friend. He'd quit when he got a decent job, by sheer happenstance, in a company the produced cutting-edge technology. Sam didn't know shit about technology, just that they did random drug tests.

6S

Rachel Green, author of Indecent Exposure, is an English woman who spends far too much time writing about demons.