Excerpt: No Ifs, Ands, or Butts

She has cigarettes threaded in her hair – it is a nasty habit.
This is, of course, when she wakes up from a mid-night nap and there they are, the tan and white Marlboro’s, yet unlit, twined in her tangled brown locks. She is going to quit, tomorrow, next week. She will get the patch, the gum. Some nicotine fix to calm the ceaseless clamor in her blood stream…
But who is she kidding. She won’t quit. The cigarettes, as she picks them from her hair, are so inviting. She lights them with her well used lighter – her fingers have rubbed the label off from constant, rather than brutal, use. She buys a new one every month. They always wear down anyway. She thinks that probably she will buy a new one soon.
Probably she mostly smokes because of the stigma. That sounds stupid, she feels stupid as she sits on park benches and pretends to be badass. She never feels as badass as she pretends to think she looks. She isn't - she is a self-loathing lump of hatred. But she's a nice girl.
That is, at least, what her neighbors say about her. Not very reassuring - don't they always say the same thing about serial killers? - but she'll take what she can get. Besides, she doesn't believe herself a bad person anyway. She thinks that probably she is misdirected, misunderstood, mis-something. That is what they call her on the phone. Miss Kilmory. They always say it wrong. Her first name is easier; of course it is, it is a word. Mirage. An illusion – a false temptation.
But that has nothing to do with stigma - she is so easily distracted. She likes the dirty looks that she gets when a mother pulls her children that much faster past her in the park, admonishing them to never develop such a nasty habit: her needling words just feed the little fire that Mirage feels somewhere deep in her stomach, as she takes another drag of the acrid, horrid smoke.
She doesn’t even like smoking – she just wants to be judged. There is something to be said about that. Probably she belongs in therapy somewhere, on some plush velvet couch with her head being shrunk down to fit on a yellow legal pad.
It’s too bad, then, that she lives in an apartment that overlooks a dirty ally filled with beer bottles and prostitutes, sometimes, their heads ducked to kiss the nether regions of customers who pay with dirty, crumpled bills. If she were to look out her window, that is what she would see, which is why she has green curtains. They are threadbare, sure, but if she pulls them shut she can pretend that maybe there is a view out there, that maybe there is sunshine, or clouds, or a beautiful cityscape. She will just pretend, because the truth is harsh.
She though, doesn’t have to worry about truth. Her name is Mirage, so she does not have to dabble in veracity – she is a falsity, by nature.
Oftentimes, she has wondered why her parents named her this. She thinks that probably it was something like her dad drunk on cheap wine coolers. Her mom, too, come to think. The night the baby’s born – can’t do any harm. If she’s messed up, she’s already going to be messed up, right?
They couldn’t have been sloshed on anything that actually cost anything – they were poor, then, bringing a baby into a literally cold world (dead of winter and their heating was spotty at best) with a threadbare crib that looked sort of like her threadbare curtains.
She grew up in this city, snowballs stained with other urban-dwellers trash and dirty sludge, grey in the holes in her gloves. She grew up with knees scraped on black asphalt that she knew much better than green grass – the patches of grass in the park were some sort of foreign invader. She was a feral child of the concrete jungle, clothed and raised by negligence in the form of plastic red cups spilling their rims to leave the carpet smelling of cheap alcohol.
She grew up in public schools with P.S.’s in front of their names, and teachers who looked just about tired out with their lives, like she was the last thing that they needed standing between them and their impending retirement. She was pushed into classes for troubled children because she cut her hair short and choppy around her head and it made her look like a thug – her inherited leather jacket (her father’s before the beer belly) only served to propagate the image, and she probably spent more time in detention than in class. It wasn’t that she was necessarily a bad kid, just didn’t know how to get a handle on her tongue, which always seemed to be about two or three steps ahead of her mind.
So when she graduated high school, barely (D for Diploma), she didn’t even go to the ceremony. Her parents didn’t care – they were completely wasted, slouched into their old couch – she’s not even sure they knew that she’d made it. Instead she climbed the fire escape of her building in her glittery black thrift-store dress with a carton of cigarettes bumping against the palm of her hand. She shook the thin sticks into her hand, one by one, turning them over as she thought about her life.
She would fly her parents’ coop, that was for sure. She had watched the alcohol turn them from bad to worse, she would never in her life turn to it to comfort her injuries. Cigarettes were her vice, sweet tar and nicotine, coating her lungs and turning them black as she hacked on the smoke, a delicious cough of self-destruction.
And look what she has made for herself: a nice little life in a nasty little apartment with green curtains shutting out the world, but mostly the bad. She gets work in a bar until two or three in the morning, getting drinks splashed onto black jeans as she offers little bowls of roasted cashews and steals desperate smoke breaks in the alley way.