Her fingers are fatigued after hours of gripping the steering wheel; and at intervals, sporting a cigarette that glows like a smoldering spoke. A two-stemmed film of translucence unfurls up and away from the Winston’s constant ember as a reminder that it awaits another of her anxiety-tinged kisses. Weary from this night driving, she’s been fighting sleep by clouding her GMC Acadia with bored, mechanical chaining and singing smoke-blended ballads along with her CD companions Kenny Chesney and Taylor Swift.
Holly doesn’t get behind the wheel and turn the ignition key of her rusted-bed Dodge pick up without first insuring her Newport is flamed up and casting off white ribbons from its ever-burning cherry. Like today, with her sandy hair scraggly, her jeans wrinkled, no makeup, she cracked the driver’s side window wide enough to extend her arm, while she motors through her town of winter-weary villagers, heading toward the Agway farm supply Co-op and then the Grand Union for groceries. Her lips pluck the cigarette from the wedge in her fingers and anchor it securely in her smile, freeing both hands to make the hard turn off of Main St., south onto one of the lesser streets.
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!”
“But Denise, there IS a way to signal hotties if you can’t text’em,” Lauren said, laughing underneath the sun umbrella at the patio table. “You don’t hafta dial their cell if you know Crypton.” She flounced her platinum pixie cut in the breeze and plucked Denise’s smoldering cigarette right out from her slender fingers.
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.
