deadbeat (WIP)

November is here. It is cold again. I exhale a puff of smoke that clears with a short gust of wind. The light pollution hovering behind the trees wavers like a lighthouse signal in the distance. The field before me undulates like the sea, rows of crops rising above pitted footpaths the way waves swell before the shore. Smoke clouds the air again, and the hitching wheeze at the end of each breath should make me drop the cigarette from my fingers and stamp the blazing edge out into the damp grass - but I just let the breeze grab ahold of the smoke like a fistful of hair and drag it away, the faint rasp of my lungs echoing behind it. The trees gather at the edges of the field like a wall, and in the night they mesh into one mass that ebbs and flows with each current of air. It is dark and quiet, like a bunny hollow. The orange butt sits in between my fingers, the point of heat beginning to burn my knuckles, and I cannot bring myself to do anything - to sit up from the slouch I collapsed into when I found my way to the garden chair, to drop the cigarette from my hand into the mud, to break my eyes away from the greyed-out fog of light on the horizon. It is raining, faintly. Eventually even the butt won’t burn. I flick the crumpled filter onto the glass tabletop of the outdoor table to my right and dig into the open pack splayed open on my lap, disintegrating into nothing in the damp evening, and find that it’s empty inside. I take measured breaths, in and out, each one haunted by a pitched hiss like the whistle of a kettle. The thing about suffocating is that it doesn’t feel any less terrifying even when you get some measure of choice in it. I sit out in the wet chill with my hitching lungs until I can’t feel my fingertips, and then I retreat back inside, swaying and stumbling into the door from the head rush. There isn’t really any moral to the story here. I don’t have enough in my bank account to pay my bills at the end of the month but I buy the cigarettes anyway. I refresh my email on my laptop, sitting open on the kitchen nook’s table, to nothing. I’m not anywhere closer to anything. Wavering. Suffocating. When the winter closes in for real there won’t be any work left at the farm for me to stay for. Every day, I wake up to ticking in my head. Every day, I write up a dozen applications and my welfare rejection remains the only unopened message in my inbox. Every day, a deep, heavy dread presses down behind my sternum and it’s not a new or unfamiliar weight, but that doesn’t make it any easier to carry. I blink and I’m back out in the garden chair, except this time I’m facing the mobile home and the lights are on. A lit cigarette is in my right hand and my shirt is inside out and I can see the blurry outline of my muck-covered boots tumbled over in the doorway through the frosted glass of the door. The curtains are drawn and the warm spill of light peaking through the fabric stands out against the blue-black night in stark relief. The only thing brighter are the sparks that fly when I strike the lighter and a vivid flame hovers above my numb fingers like magic, casting bronze shadows that could almost make me believe there was warmth here. It’s raining, still, but only faintly. I blink again and I’m naked in the shower, the water turned off but the humid heat of it hanging around me like a blanket. I’m shivering. A pile of hair sits in the drain catch, an ankle-high puddle soaking through my feet. The taste of ash is heavy in the back of my throat. Suddenly I’m at the door again, pushing it open on creaking hinges. I’m still in the same clothes but this time they are on the right way. There’s a streak of smudged ash across my right thigh. I sit back in the chair and I’m facing the mobile home again but the lights are out. An indistinguishable mass in the darkness. I close my eyes and open them at the kitchen nook in my underwear, but my laptop is dead and I’m just staring into nothing. The kettle is whistling on the counter, billowing water vapor, and I think to myself, I need to get my clothes off the line tomorrow. Everything is always tomorrow. At night, when I’m curled over in my borrowed bed, encased within booming silence like the style within the morning glory’s bowed head, I can see the bloom of my own breath in front of me like smoke. I’m shivering still. I blink and I’m out in the ditch behind the field, watching the rusted carcass of an abandoned tractor as it sits in a beam of the full moon’s light. It lays collapsed in the mud and frost, unmoving, forgotten. Meaningless.