A Thin Winstone Cigarette | Yusif Mariwany | Story
Writer: Yusif Mariwany
Translater: Shayan sofisultani
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A winters night, I slither into my bed pulling the blanket on myself. I remember that winter night from two years ago I was asleep in my room, that night Massud was sleeping under the window to my left, putting my hands behind my pillow ( it’s a habit to lock my fingers like that) a thin Winstone cigarette came into my hand( without me noticing). As if reaching out for a fantasy and taking a look at it to see where it takes me so that I can follow it. Putting it on my lips, actually, it wasn’t my will, nor anyone else’s will, it was the cigarette or…..
I don’t know if this is my will to travel through this fantasy or it’s something from the past or the future connected to it. Or a fantasy that is looking for someone if that someone comes its way it will hunt that person and turn him or her into a character in its story. The fantasies are hunters and I’m a game traped in the form of an animal, some of the fantasies don’t like it when I change their tales, when I find myself walking a road that is not mine and if I could I would not walk that road, I would walk back the same way that I came from without knowing what would happen at the end of that road or what catastrophe would befall me. Sometimes in some of these fantasies, I would choose to do and change the story the way I want. Sometimes when I’m walking on the streets with my hands in my pocket, or when I have an AK47 in my hands walking out behind a barricade, shooting and walking with heavy steps and shouting full of wrath and anger killing them, suddenly I’m shot, my fantasy stops and rewinds, I put that bullet back into the fantasy and insist that that’s how it should be, or I can kill all the humans on the planet and then gain a medal of honour from the overlord of the Milkyway galaxy and feel prideful about my existence.
And sometimes a man swinging an axe in his hands cutting wood for fire. watching him for hours while sitting as he cuts the wood, he is sweating and still cutting wood, neither do i have the energy to talk to him nor he has anything to say, but he still looks at me, its as if he is in the TV while i watch him with max volume, as if the only thing he knows is to cut wood and make fire. Standing up and walking away but i can still hear his axe swinging, makes one wonder how big is that fire?.
I doubt that this is me that is in my own or other peoples fantasies or am i the one who eats, walks, works, mates and in the end, melts and they say he is dead.
fantasy… fantasy…
I reached out for the continuation of this fantasy, this one was a lighter, lighting my cigar.
Powerlessly standing there, inhaling deeply as the smock slithers through all my veins.
You never smocked at home because of your mother, when you smelled of it her heart would suffer. this is breaking the rule of home and honour.
But you are powerless, you are just a body that has to smock this cigar but this has nothing to do with you. when you are in society you are a body that your clothes, your stuff, humans, non-humans or anything that you can feel with your five senses have nothing to do with your true self.
When you are eating you are a body that needs something so that it won’t stop working and you can be in that body that has nothing to do with you, but you are imprisoned inside of it and you have to do whatever it wants. you crave for freedom but your body won’t allow it.
Your nothing without body and so is the body without you, at the same time you have nothing in common or anything that connects you, you have just correlated.
But you are rebellious, like a hurricane you come and destroy everything without anyone seeing you, the only thing you leave behind is destruction. You prove your existence and then leave, even the disaster left after you have nothing to do with you, everything in that moment is their difficulty, the past was only an awakening call, it was destroyed right there and then. you are only responsible for the cigarette that you are nearing your mouth.
That was a disaster. The cigarette hole in my blanket was a disaster, if my mother were to get in my room and see me with the blanket in that condition…
If like that night my mother followed me on the street crying because she saw the cigarette on my lips…
If she were to see me…
A hole in my blanket or a deep and dark abyss that can contain and bury our entire house inside of it. I would stand in front of the abyss throwing anything that I regard as my own inside of it. I’ve thrown the hardest mountains of this land inside, all those females that made me turn my head for them because of a smile, in my fantasies I’ve bitten their lips held their breasts and we’ve striped in the middle of a land of snow, our entire beings were filled with moaning melting all of winters snow, all of this inside that abyss.
Those thousands of people that I’ve burned, drownd or killed with a gun, with a sword, an axe, with a knife or those I’ve penetrated with a pencil, drank their blood I’ve thrown their corps inside that abyss so that they won’t rot and smell in my room, they are all in there I can find every single one of them.
This is my greatest secret and no one must know about them.
Your body is powerless, heavy and numb you can’t get up to open the window and ventilate the room of the cigarette smoke, you crawl, using your elbow you slither no matter how much you look up you don’t seem to be able to get to the window, a bolder that wind put on your back has immobilized you, your breath has the black smoke of a burning city inside and your strength that turned you into a hurricane, can’t even take you to the window, using all of you hidden strength and by slithering from that empty place where Massud should have been sleeping.
I arrived in front of the window reaching my hand up to the edge clawing at it, hanging my self and inching up until my head reaching up to the window opening it.
Putting the cigar on your lip inhaling it deeply and the smoke slithers…
What is all this suffering for? why are you so weak because of this damn cigarette? these tears… why are you so exhausted?.
A sizzling sound is heard between my fingers that hold the cigarette when I looked at it, my fingers were melting.
Pain it was PAIN. Where did this pain come from where did it reach? no no… this pain is a dress that is put on you. A dress that is silencing your SHRIEKS and telling you that only pain is the truth for you. All the pains of your body with you and all your pain is connected to your body separating you is extremely difficult.
Pain reminds you that you have to free yourself, you have to free yourself, but where is freedom? you look around, extending your neck and glance at the horizon, which horizon? which freedom? pain is within you. Is freedom behind those mountains? is it where the roughnecks and those with power gaze at it and swear on it? you have to traverse the arduous roads and travel the dense and ominous forests, cross the icebergs, and the hellish deserts being overflown with pain and that pain being what motivates and gives power for you to look for liberation?.
Sit down and listen to the sound of wind…
That’s it… the end…
All the pain is subsiding…
I can’t tell the time but it’s early in the morning, I’m on the main street walking on the pavement many people are standing on the other side watching me not taking their eyes off me.
In fear of their heavy gaze, I hang my head down and speed up, reaching my hand down the pocket of my green long jeans, something comes to my hand.
A thin Winstone cigarette…
Bring it to your lips, it is a familiar gift and has nothing to do with you.
