The Cigarette | Becca Yenser 

We kept a cigarette at the back of the drawer of the living room table. We’ll smoke that cigarette whenever something happens, we told ourselves, like a promotion or a reelection or a wedding. Or a death or an earthquake or the end of the world, haha. 

The cigarette rolled around in there if you opened up the drawer to look for something. All that was in the drawer were old love letters, a mixtape, a few hairbands, and a part of something that went to something else. Spring passed, and summer, and fall, then winter. The next year, we moved the table to a new apartment, but just taped up the drawer for the move; didn’t empty it. In this new apartment, the table sat in the corner of a tiny room which was supposed to be a dining room, except a plastic chandelier hung too low in the middle of the room. So we walked around it or put plants under it and sometimes pretended it wasn’t too low and then hit our heads in the middle of the night. 

That spring one of us got bronchitis and flew to New Mexico to ‘heal.’ Sunshine, low humidity, spicy food. One of us had an affair with a local man, then secretly hoped to be pregnant. Maybe I’m pregnant, she thought, six hundred miles away, but soon replaced that thought with the right ones: how could I do this? Will he forgive me? Do I have AIDS? The cigarette rolled in the back of the drawer. 

In the summer we made love on a bed on the floor. There was a strange stain coming down from the ceiling almost to the carpet. At night we looked at it illuminated by the streetlight. There was also a stain on the blinds in the corner of the room that looked a lot like blood. Nail polish can look a lot like blood, we said. 

We thought nothing would ever happen, but then that fall one of us got pregnant. A not-skinny belly turned to a hard “C” in profile. The apartment, which was next to a slow, dirty river, kept getting broken into. One day, at school, blood appeared on underwear. Don’t panic, we said, not to panic. But the one of us who was pregnant laid in bed for seven hours and moaned. October light came into the bedroom in the late afternoon. The windows opened but only if propped up with books. The homeless men dug in the dumpsters below. 

She caught the baby over the toilet with one hand and walked slowly to bury it by the river. In the early morning, she caught the placenta, and said a prayer before she flushed it. The placenta matters, too, she said. One of us smoked the cigarette.

Becca Yenser is a writer living in Wichita, Kansas. They are the author of the poetry chapbook, Too High and Too Blue In New Mexico (Dancing Girl Press, 2018). Their work appears in Hobart, Madcap Review, The Nervous Breakdown, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, and Fanzine, and is forthcoming in No Contact Mag, X-R-A-Y, and Heavy Feather Review. They like paying attention.