Fiction

★Mad Skills Of The Tobacconist

A man, The Tobacconist, has mad skills.

A man, The Tobacconist, gets up at 5 AM and rides his bike into town and looks in dumpsters and garbage cans at The University. He has no money. He finds bottles and cans, each worth ten cents. He puts them in plastic bags and takes them to the liquor store and puts them in the machine. The machine grumbles and whines and crushes his cans. The machine spits out a piece of paper and he takes the paper and gives it to someone and buys rolling tobacco.

The Tobacconist is tired and depressed and lonely, and has cancer.

He has no money and must spend all his money on rolling tobacco. Love and tobacco and cancer are all mixed up in his head.

The Tobacconist thinks about dying, and thinks maybe God is torturing him and hates him. Each cell in his body screams and mutates, and is dying, and The Tobacconist gets up at 5 AM and rides his bike into town, to The University.

The Tobacconist sits under the bridge on cracked concrete slabs and sees graffiti and tries to read it and can’t. Pigeons are watching him from concrete ledges above his head. He takes a cigarette paper and rolls a cigarette. He takes a bit of cotton from a cotton ball and makes a little plug of cotton, a filter, and sticks it into the end of the cigarette, and is mildly pleased. He lights the cigarette with a match and smokes it and watches the pigeons.

The Tobacconist hears something on the radio, on a small black radio with bright red dials and a bent antenna. He hears that rolling tobacco cigarettes give you more cancer than regular cigarettes, or faster cancer.

The Tobacconist laughs and feels depressed and crazy and stupid. This is absurd, thinks The Tobacconist. He has just rolled twenty perfect cigarettes and stuck twenty pill-shaped cotton filters into them, and is pleased by this.

He masturbates daydreams under the bridge. No one sees him.

He closes his eyes and has a nice orgasm daydream and tries to use his mad skills to kill the cancer and fails. He opens his eyes and looks up into outer space, and cannot see outer space. The sky is opaque and blue from sunlight reflected from the oceans, which is something he heard about on the radio, on a program called Ask Dr. Science.

The Tobacconist sends a psychic message into outer space.

The message says “aliens or Jesus come down and cure my cancer, please.”

The Tobacconist doesn’t want to die yet.

The purple dog comes when The Tobacconist is in the shower.

The purple dog is sitting on his bed, fully materialized, and The Tobacconist comes in naked and hairy, with dripping hair, and is surprised to see the purple dog, who he senses is from outer space, and is a weiner dog.

“Yes,” says the purple dog. “I received your psychic message.”

The purple dog pants and his tongue is long and red like a real dog’s tongue.

The Tobacconist sits down and his hands tremble as he pulls some dirty underwear from a pile under his bed and puts them on. The Tobacconist shakes his head. He brushes the hair back from his eyes and rolls a perfect cigarette and forgets to put the plug of cotton into it.

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