CECI N’EST PAS UNE PIPE

A honey-like smell, bittered by the smooth gleam of rum permeated his red white, and blue wool plaid coat. The man sat before a gum and plastic-littered street run over by cars, by a street light that flickered even when it wasn’t night. In his beach chair, he overlooked the humming and buzzing of bees in the streets while the sun drew more coffee brown speckles over his cheeks. He sat regally, his hair glazed back and hidden beneath his charcoal hat, and his lips pursed with a pine and plastic made pipe residing between them. 

A girl stared at her box of cigarettes, with only two left, she wondered how she’d find her next pack. If she would have to change out of her school uniform or at least undo a few buttons. She walked briskly, her nose growing crimson while the wind bit at her olive cheeks callously, unforgiving of her prematurely broken heart. She was too young to carry the cough that garnished her ginger lungs, or her bag of bones made up of soiled scarlet letters and knots she didn’t know the origin of. The wrinkle that had settled by her brow and the white hairs she refused to pull out had grown over a girl whose sixteenth birthday it would be in a matter of hours. The apple red pearls that she watched so eagerly run down from her left arm into her palms, she squeezed tightly the night before; she would let them dry in her hands and hold them closely like offspring. Birds Born of her own Blood.

Across from her, she saw a man and a cloud of smoke. She slipped her near-empty box of cigarettes into her pocket. 

“I seem to have run out of cigarettes, could I join you for a smoke”

“You aren’t meant to inhale from a pipe, but I suppose so,” the man said.

The girl sat on the ground beside him. The man passed her the pipe. 

“Are you happy?” she asked.

His eyes remained unmoving from their fixation on the road before him. He told her he wasn’t sure.

“I have a little red dove inside of me. I pour hot rum over her wings because one day she stopped singing. I grew close with someone who made her sing, and she forgot how to sing for me. She told me she could only ever sing for them. Her cry is the closest I can get to her song,” he said.

“My little red dove I only see now when I slit her out. She used to visit me when someone else came around, but now the only way I see her is in apple-red pearls that I carry. I’ve lost my little red dove” she said.

The girl took out her tin box of cigarettes and set them on the ground. The box said on it “Black Currant Pastilles for throat soothing.” The man who sat beside her crawled into his pipe. He grew small and held onto the rim of it, he climbed his way into the mouth of the dark cashew-colored pipe. The girl lit a match to its surface and breathed in the smoke. She then set it down beside her cigarette box and grew small too. She climbed inside of the embers and there the man was at the other side of the sea of tobacco. They both stood on either side of the bowl, and the two dove into the chamber.