Eleanor fled the great ball room of Stoppard Hall, parting the milling throng; jostling party goers as she escaped. That was, until she herself was brought up short by a familiar face.
He raised his gloved hand to hail her, “Eleanor, so glad I caught you!”
Marge was aching for a cigarette. It had only been twenty minutes or so since her last cigarette break when she’d polished off three unbelievably delicious Winston 100s in rapid succession but now she was craving a juicy Newport 100 and she couldn’t wait another second. Yet wait she must... for forty more excruciating minutes.
Penny moaned. The red-haired business manager just calculated the time span of her enforced no-smoking for her spur-of-the-moment out-of-town conference. “Thursday I won’t be able to smoke for at least fourteen hours.” Depressed, she pondered, “That’s how long I’ll be in the air, in taxis and presenting our strategy to ‘corporate’ while conferring with our clients.”
Both of Briana’s hands click in staccato tempo the alphanumerics of her computer’s keyboard. Her full, deep lashes extend overtop green eyes riveted and unblinking; absorbed in text and dollar figures shown on the monitor. Her spotless white blouse barely draped with straight auburn hair dimly reflects in the face of the screen.
The bullet-form ember of her Parliament Blue, glowing more golden than her tresses, points straight to the electronic figures within the screen. Briana is way beyond expert at ejecting smoke hands-free from her superbly controlled lips; drawing down on the filter, channeling the smoky draft up to her nasal chambers, where she gulps the mass down, down deeper into her soul.
This is a brief excerpt from the September–October 2010 issue of Smoke Signals magazine, and one of my first columns for the free/public version, "My First Decade at The Orgy":
Boardhost shut down my forum and multimedia archive near the end of March because they recently implemented a ban on smoking and fetish content. Way back in 2000 when I opened the first incarnation of "Sublime," I asked the then owner of Boardhost (who was pretty much a one man band at the time) if he had any problems with SF content. He told me flatly that he absolutely did not.
La petite mort is French for "the little death." The expression is most often used to describe the experience of having an orgasm, but is also used to describe the release of emotional energy (catharsis) that accompanies experiencing the climax of a creative expression, as well as the experience of going through a shocking life-changing event.
