Written by Tommy King
Illustrated by Sylvain Chan
I walked for what felt like days until I stopped by a small coffee shop – the squat type that surely didn’t turn over much revenue. It occupied the street inconspicuously, its old and haggard owner slipping a mere handful of cups into the dishwasher. She might have occupied herself better had she washed them by hand.
Outside was more charming than inside, so I stood for a moment. Only one passenger accompanied me – the man with ash at his feet. Several cigarette butts were strewn in and around his toes as he sat smoking another. My years of walking have known only one constant: for each cigarette, an entire story can be told. The other wanderers, with phones at their ears and laptops at their fingertips, were invariably less interesting.
I sat beside him and nodded compassionately – a nod of recognition. He smiled and offered a stray cigarette, sparking it up for me as I pursed it between my lips.
We jointly embraced the rich tastes of tobacco; each sprinkle of ash on the floor unfurled a new story, emerging like dolphins driven under the merciless waves of time.
As it is with people of this kind, the chronology did not begin at childhood. What good are the years of becoming when one has been left to rot by time, never becoming anything at all? The causality sustaining all things had betrayed him. In one moment, he might be a caterpillar, recalling the leaves he had devoured and the branches he had been knocked from. But what good would that be when, in another moment, as the layman anticipates his becoming a butterfly, he begins to speak of himself as a hyena scavenging on arid plains?
More expedient for the ash at his feet was to start with a person, presumably the first that ever made sense. We become when we are seen. Which is why, in forlorn childhood, wasted, miserable, decrepit, neglected, we do not exist at all. Only one person brought him into existence.
Grace was her name. One could see his eyes light up as he mentioned her – the fire at the end of his cigarette was indistinguishable from the hazy wonder between his eyelids.
Grace was her effect. That something so named should correspond to its word was of fantastic puzzlement to him. The entire enterprise of language – formed in Eden, desecrated in Babel, consecrated by the first croak of a frog, and diversified by all its descendants thereafter – was justified by this one woman. He spoke of having first met her as though of a halcyon from which the entire species had since been banished. It wore the comforting orange hue of a distant sunset and entered his lips like a soothing zephyr through the cigarette.
“In those eyes, caring and kind, I met God”. He flicked another butt onto the floor. Grace was God, and God he peered into. He took a brief pause from his cigarette just to soak in the air that she, through his words, had suffused and purified.
For one cigarette, a story; for one inhale, an exhale. His brief moment of overwhelming joy dissipated in a tranquil melancholy. God might be the culmination of all the hopes we toss into our existential cauldron, but very rarely does He live up to our expectations. We depend on Him for our salvation, but He is indifferent. My companion looked into the eyes of Grace and found the beauty of God’s creation, total and complete, but she retreated into his to escape its cruelty. Any beauty had already bled from the eyes of one she loved long before.
He saw Grace vividly, but for her, he was a mere shadow. Another butt on the floor, another scattering of ash beside his feet, another life forsaken.
Radiant sun sprayed through the distant clouds, scorching my hair and making me nauseous. We had been speaking for a while. I looked towards my own feet and saw several butts surrounded by thick, protuberant remnants of ash. My companion must have caught the last train home. Or was it the first? I searched around frantically for him. The streets were bare.
Who was he – the man with ash at his feet? The ash now squarely at my feet, an answer, like all things in this world, wouldn’t have mattered at all.
