Pall Mall Red 100s
At 2:31 in the morning, he lit what he was sure would be his last cigarette.
As smoke filled his lungs and nicotine raced through his bloodstream, the only regret he had was that he’d chosen now of all times to be cheap.
He didn’t really need to scrimp and save anymore, but habit led him straight to the pack of Pall Malls he was now about to finish. His rationale had always been that if they were good enough for Vonnegut, they were good enough for him, but in hindsight it seemed this particular occasion should have warranted something a bit classier.
What he wanted was a Lucky Strike.
The first time he tasted one had been the morning of New Year’s Eve a few years prior (described for many months after as “the best day and night of his life”). He had “borrowed” a relative’s car at approximately 1:30 that morning and driven the five hours to Chicago, where he was greeted by his best friend and a pack of Luckies (described forever after as “the best cigarette he’d ever tasted).
“IT’S TOASTED!”
Whether or not this short blurb on the side of the packaging meant a damn thing, he was sure he tasted it, and if it was in fact simply a placebo effect brought on by hearing the culturally-pervasive slogan over and over again, well, he didn’t mind one bit.
But he hadn’t had one in months.
On the bright side, Pall Malls burned significantly slower than Luckies, and to be fair, it made the waiting significantly more bearable. He needed something to do with his hands, and this was certainly doing the trick.
The waiting.
It wasn’t really something he had thought about beforehand. The passivity of the event seemed contradictory to every example he’d ever read of prior.
He supposed it was just semantics, but as the cigarette burned closer and closer to the filter, he was becoming quite anxious.
After another drag, his worries were quelled as he began to feel his eyes grow heavy, and a faint tinge of pain in what he would normally have called the pit of his stomach, but, thanks to careful research, knew now was his liver.
He inhaled one more time, watching closely as the ember burnt down to the edge of the filter, releasing that acrid (though comfortably familiar) smell of burning cellulose.
He dropped the butt in the ashtray and leaned over.
At 2:43 in the morning, his eyes closed and his liver shut down, his body quickly following suit as he entered into the ethereal black.
The apartment was lifeless, save for the still burning tobacco (which had now begun to set the empty package of Ambien alight), and the slight smile of pure contentedness on his face.
The note on his lap simply read, “good night.”
