Malboros

• Peter Le, Grade 12
• Short Story
• 2014

I inhaled my first insufferable breath of death at the age of fifteen. It’s chemical induced distaste groped my throat and made me cough hard and violent. I thought I looked cool with a cigarette in my hand, blowing incongruent hazes of smoke out of my gawped pink lips, full of young blood. All the characters in my books smoked and the writers smoked. So did my uncle. As consequence, I figured it was all right if I did. I thought it such a poetic act that poetic, damaged people did. I wasn’t poetic nor damaged, just hoping to be. I don’t know why. Maybe because all my favourite writers were beautifully articulated and wrote such incredible things, brilliantly and originally woven words that touched my soul. I thought if people saw me smoking they would think, oh he’s got a story behind him, a troubled past, a real character that one. Maybe it was this preconception that I desired for unlike such, I was living a lackluster teenage life.

Then my uncle died of cancer. I was okay with his death, he was a smoker. It was inevitable. But this is not why I stopped. I decided to quit the day of his funeral. Everything was just so sad, watching his eroded body in it’s final state of collapse, clad in an eloquent black suit with make up on his pale face.

We used to smoke together and talk about books. He was such a beautiful old man, beautiful mind and soul. Now he was a character - unlike him, I was a piece of shit. And to watch this brilliant human decay and erode to an incapable state, relying on a machine killed me. The whole process of his treatment was worse than death. We didn’t talk about books anymore. We couldn’t talk anymore because his tongue was removed. But I still visited him in the hospital before his death. I would bring books and talk about the authors and he would just watch and half-heartedly smile. What hurt most were his eyes. Of his hospitalized days, those were the saddest eyes, shooting weak glances of melancholy and pain. It was so tragic.

After the funeral I smoked a cigarette and inhaled long deep drags.