Warning this is about heavy smoking and it’s effects on the
body. If you don’t like that then don’t read this you silly
goose!
Sarah – Changing of the Guard
Sarah had just turned 22 and was graduated college, class
of 82, with a degree in marketing. Dad had come to the
graduation and was driving her home with all her
belongings. Sarah thought “It’s a shame mom couldn’t make
it but she was pretty sick from what dad said”.
She took a huge triple drag from her spent Marlboro 100,
held it as she pulled a fresh cigarette from her pack then
slowly exhaled the spent smoke through her nose as the
brought the fresh cigarette to life from the ember of the
last. The cigarette jumped to life in Sarah’s experienced
mouth and tendrils of smoke escaped from her tiny nostrils
as she double pumped. They were halfway through the six
hour drive and she’d been smoking one after another like
this for most the trip. Mark wasn’t concerned, in-fact he
was elated that Lori’s and his years of effort to make
Sarah a natural born smoker had paid back such dividends.
Sarah was smoking about 5ppd of full flavor 100’s a day and
showed no signs of slowing.
Mark smiled, remembering the milestones in Sarah’s life.
Her first drag on a cigarette at 6 months. Her first full
cigarette at few months later and 5 a day at one year old.
It just grew naturally from there; A pack a day at 3, two
packs a day at 8, three packs a day at 13. Four packs a day
by the time she graduated high school and now in college a
carton every two days. He kept track of her smoking from
the checks she’d write to the college bookstore for
cigarettes.
Mark was proud of Sarah’s smoking prowess. He’d figured out
that she’d smoked hundreds of thousands of cigarettes so
far, the equivilent of a pack a day smoker smoking 64
years. “Not bad for a 22 year old” he thought as he felt
the familiar tingling in his pants. Of course you couldn’t
smoke that much for that long at such a young age without
something to show for it. Sarah weezed with every cloudy
breath she took and coughed deeply every few minutes. She’s
even had to move to the ground floor of the dorm her senior
year because she couldn’t take the stairs .
As they approached home Mark knew he’d have to prepare
Sarah for Lori’s condition, it had deteriorated a lot since
spring break. As Sarah opened up her third pack of Marlboro
100’s Mark explained to Sarah that Lori had taken a turn
for the worse and was dying of Lung Cancer. Sarah wasn’t
surprised. “I knew mom was getting worse but I never knew
how to bring it up.”
“I don’t think it need to be brought up. She’s lead a full
life the way she wanted to lead it and I know she’s happy”
Mark added “She’s Probably only got a few weeks left now.”
Sarah looked down at the cigarette permanently vised
between her brown stained fingers and watched the
bluish-white smoke slowly curl into the air. She said “I
wonder how she got it?”, fully knowing the answer. Mark
lied “Nobody really knows… sometimes it just happens.”
Now, Sarah was no fool but there was an unwritten rule in
her family that nothing bad would ever be said about
smoking. It had started before Sarah remembered. She grew
up as an average kid in an average family with one
important difference, she smoked. She couldn’t remember not
smoking and she’d never made a decision to smoke, it was
just always there. In health class they would talk about
how smoking was bad for you but Sarah had seen the health
teacher smoking in her car in the parking lot. Several
times she’d been caught smoking in the bathroom between
classes and had been scolded on the health effects and told
it would stunt her growth but she knew those teachers
smoked too. In-fact everyone seemed to smoke and her mom
had told her it was just something grownups said to keep
kids from smoking younger than they thought they should.
As the years went by she’d learned to read the warning on
the pack, watched as news stories told how bad smoking was
and so on. She’d slowly realized that smoking might not
been good for her but it was so slow and gradual that it
never made a deep impact on her. She figured that
occasionally people would get sick from smoking too much
but that she didn’t smoke that much and anyway those people
were old and she was young. Her family all played the game
and it helped her ignore the warning signs her body was
sending her.
Even with what her father has told her she wasn’t ready for
what she saw when she got home. There was her mom, laying
on a hospital bed in the living room. She looked gastly,
her skin was white, her breathing was labored and shallow
except when she inhaled from her cigarettes and that was
the strangest of all. There was what remained of her
mother, with a cigarette in each nostril and one in her
mouth. A continuious cloud of smoke was raising from the
bed as her mother struggled in inhale one more lifegiving
lungfull of smoke. Her mother was a smoking machine now. A
fitting end for a women who worshiped cigarettes more than
life itself.
She was agast but at the same time she couldn’t take her
eyes away. She knew her mother must be in a great deal of
pain but she was also in estacy. She realized that her
mother had finally realized her dream. All the extrenious
details of life didn’t matter anymore, life had only one
purpose now, smoke! Nothing existed but the smoke comming
of an endless chain of cigarettes going back 30+ years. She
has become the ultimate smoker and was in smoker heaven
now.
Mark introduced Sarah to Mitzi as she came into the room to
change Lori’s cigarettes. Sarah watched as Mitzi put three
Kool Longs in her mouth and brought them to life. Sarah
marveled as Mitzi lovingly removed the brown spent filters
from her mother’s mouth and replaced them with fresh ones
from her own. Mitzi kept one her Kool in the corner of her
mouth as she lit another Marlboro and placed in her
mother’s mouth. Mitzi left trailing a stream of smoke from
her Kool which was already mostly smoked down. Looking back
to hr mother the only sign of life was the red glow of the
embers of her three cigarettes as she rythmically sucked
her pleasure from them. There were her reason of existence
now and they yielded their life to her.
Sarah fumbled with her pack and took out a fresh Marlboro
100, which she quickly brought to life. She dragged heavily
on it as she watched her mother suck on hers. It started to
occur to her that she was a lot more like her mom than she
wanted to admit. She asked her dad “How much pain is she
in?”. He said he thought the drugs were helping a lot but
she was suffering. During the next week Sarah got to talk
to her mom on several occasions and even did what she could
to help Mark and Mitzi keep mom supplied with cigarettes.
—
The night after the funeral Sarah went up to her old room
and laid on her bed smoking and thinking. Dad had let Mitzi
stay on until she found a new job and they had both gone to
bed. She looked over and saw her Smoking Susie doll sitting
on a shelf. It brought back a lot of childhood memories,
memories Sarah knew other people didn’t have. She thought
about her life of smoking, it killed her mom and she didn’t
even want to stop. She knew she never could and she knew
that a fate similar to her mom’s awaited her, the thing is,
she didn’t care. More than that, it excited her. In fact
she couldn’t get the image of her mom’s final days of
desperate, massive smoking out of her head, she wondered if
she’d be that way in the end, she wondered what it was
like, she wanted to smoke like that herself. She could feel
herself getting excited.
She quietly got up and locked the bedroom door. She took
one final drag on her Marlboro 100 and put it out in the
ashtray. She shook two fresh cigarettes from her pack and
lit them like she’d been doing for her mother. Slowly she
screwed one into each of her nostrils. She closed her mouth
and took a small, tentative drag, inhaled it and watched
the embers get a little brighter then the smoke come out of
her mouth as she exhaled. She liked the tingling sensation
in her nasal passages. She closed her mouth again and took
a bigger drag, this was good, really good. She could feel
herself getting wet. She took out another cigarette and lit
up, she started dragging on the one in her mouth and
inhaling it then finishing the inhale through her nostrils.
This was really good.
She laid back and started stroaking herself as she took
bigger and bigger drags through her cigarette filled
nostrils, the smoke was intoxicating. Before she knew what
hit her she came and had to bite the moist filter of her
cigarette to keep from screaming.
The next morning after breakfast she sat smoking and
holding the cigarette so the sidestream smoke would go up
her nose as she breathed.