Combustion (3)

The certainty of the heat felt first on the skin: by the middle of the summer they could feel it in their entrails. The heat: what had started as a promise for longer days, always ended as a threat to rot their intestines. But there was an undeniable beauty in sitting on the sidewalk outside the store facing the parking lot, witnessing the calcination of concrete. She flung her cigarette under the car parked in front of them. For a few seconds she imagined metal, plastic and glass flying around. Blowing shit up was something that came to her mind every time she lit one: for her, smoking was not an addiction but a commitment to that beautiful image.

He put what was left of his cigarette under one of his boots and crushed it until there was no more smoke coming out. Before standing up they kissed. The menthol lingering in their lips created the momentary illusion of a cool intimate retreat. But when their tongues met, a world of warm organs in bodies exposed to the outside heat was revealed to their senses. She wasn't sure if the repulsion she had just felt was ignited by the smell of antifreeze leaking from the car being started two parking spaces from where they were sitting or by his breath, hot as the afternoon breeze.

Their brake was over and the store manager was about to stick her head out of the door and yell at them. She saw them coming back in and muttered something about how much they smoked. And didn't they know how unhealthy it was? Weren't they told at school the way cigarettes destroy your lungs and your body? "Yes" said Laura as she walked behind the counter, next to the cash register, "I know that, I'm not stupid". She took the pack out of her jeans pocket and put it on the bottom shelf behind her. Working mostly behind the counter meant that she had to bend over a lot. If a customer wanted to buy one of the masks on the wall behind her -they were there only for display-, she had to get it from the lower shelves or from cardboard box under the register.

Before she got the job there, Laura didn't know there was a costume store downtown. Having spent all of her life where most people in the city live she barely knew there was a downtown. The suburbs had always been the center of her life: trailer parks, subdivisions where maintenance had been long neglected by neighborhood associations, churches, abandoned strip malls, gas stations and gigantic auto-parts stores.
to be continued>>