~~~~~All the old knives That have rusted in my back, I drive in yours.
Author: Phaedrus (Thrace of Macedonia)~~~~~~~~~~

The rope of smoke coming from the tip of my cigarette filled the air with a kind of fatal mysticism. The potential of disease behind the closed curtains, smoke, and mirrors. A sort of creeping, yet obvious disease that I had become accustomed to these days. I’ve been smoking for four months now. One hundred and fifteen days to be exact.

I suppose that means that I’m a “smoker.” It sounds professional. As if somehow I could fill my “nine-to-five” putting tiny cylinders that come with the promise of death to my lips and call it a career.

I know what you’re thinking. And yes, I had put tiny cylinders to my lips before and called it a career. Sex and death aren’t that different after all. But that was the past. I’m very different now.

She made me this way.

So as the smoke curls into the heavy air, dancing its seductive dance in the wind, I sit waiting. The splintered picnic table that I chose to call a temporary home reminded me constantly of this fact. I was in the middle of the desert—reds and oranges and strange purples that surround me like the stereotypical, classroom watercolor of a five year-old and the cloudy visions of a carnival psychic. I could only assume it was someone’s cruel idea of a joke to place a picnic table on a mound of dirt across the highway from a gas station and a restaurant that looked as though it had been closed since prohibition.

I wasn’t laughing.

But maybe my lack of laughter stemmed from that fact that I saw the car and knew it was her. A flaunting, garish vehicle announcing its presence with the insistent boom and pulse of looping bass. She saw me staring and pulled over so that the car sat several feet away from my own, landing in a cloud of hot, impermanent earth. The music stopped, her door opened, and then all I saw was a smile I hadn’t exactly missed and a person I didn’t exactly trust. But I had no other options.

I had to start from the beginning.

“Spencer,” she says, walking towards me.

I could prepare myself for the disingenuous hug and the flowery perfume, but could never be ready for the memories that came flooding back at almost biblical proportions.

“Madison.”

“You look good,” she says with an approving nod.

We’re women, after all, and that means I had lost an obvious amount of weight. She was right. Eating had become a nagging wife, a pleading parent, an embarrassing habit. It was hard to eat and feed a body that I wasn’t so sure I wanted anymore. It was hard to sustain a life that I no longer felt I deserved.

“So do you,” I say, attempting a smile, “should we sit down?”

She looks concerned as she spots the picnic table behind me, “Ok.”

It’s the strangest thing to see Madison—in her desperate flair and insincere pretention—sitting on that dark, damaged bench. I imagined it was comparable to seeing a flamingo hunting in camouflage or an Olympic-size pool in the middle of the jungle.

“I’m sorry about what happened,” she says, uncomfortably. And suddenly it’s no longer about flamingos or pools.

It’s about Ashley.

“Are you?”

“Look, I know that you probably don’t trust a lot of people right now. And I know you don’t have a reason to trust anyone from that house—including me. But no one told me what the outcome would be. I didn’t know they were going to…”

“What did they tell you then?”

“Not a lot.”

I try to laugh, but I only sound bitter and pained, “Not a lot. That doesn’t do me a lot of good, does it?”