Part 13

Waiting at the platform, a man passed by in front of her. She watched him inhale from his thin white cigarette, the end of it turning bright red as he satisfied his nicotine craving.

Blowing the gray smoke out, he continued walking, the gray smoke, now a halo surrounding and following him away.

Two girls sat on the railing were also puffing away. Their conversation was littered with breaks every now and then as each one took a breath from their cigarette. Sixteen years old and they already surrounded themselves with the swirls of gray haze and little white sticks that seemed to fit perfectly and naturally between their two fingers. Every once in a while they would turn away to spit onto the platform floor. Juliet couldn’t quite figure out which was the more disgusting habit: the knowledge that with every breath from each cigarette they were bringing themselves and those around them that much closer to lung cancer and the inevitable death, or the fact that they were defiling public space with their cigarette butts and spats of saliva.