She notices me watching.

“Do you want one?” she asks, proffering the packet.

I shake my head. “No. Thanks.”

“Good girl.”

Suck.

“Go ahead,” she says.

“Sorry?”

“You can ask me. You’re not the first and you won’t be the last. But you will get the same answer.”

It sounds like a riddle. I’ve never been particularly good at riddles.

“What question?”

She holds what remains of her cigarette up toward me, the butt pinched tightly between two fingers so the circular shape is now an uneven oval. Ash drops off the tip and lands on my jeans. I brush it off.

“You’re wondering why I’m still smoking,” she says.

“No I wasn’t.”

“Really?”

“No.”

“Oh, right. You have bigger things to worry about. Ignore me. I’ll finish this and be out of your hair.”

I try to ignore her. I sit with my hands under my thighs and the toes of my boots trailing in the dirt, and look out east, over the hills that rim our town. Some people like to people-watch. Me, I’ve always loved cloud-watching and searching for hidden animals or faces. Today is a good day for it. A low bank of clouds stretches above the hills, quite a variety today. Fluffy white ones like snow cones, long, gray, cigar-shaped clouds with wispy ends. The occasional fat, heavy, airship-shaped cloud, its belly swollen with rain.

Normally I’d feel joy at the sight of them. But today all I can think about is that someday soon I’ll drink in my last sight of them, and then that’ll be it. And I think, Will I know? That it’s my last sight? Will I watch them disappear into the sunset one night and know that I’ll take my last breath before the sun rises again and brings forth a fresh batch to be admired? Or will I be completely unaware? Unappreciative, delirious, and most likely unconscious from a cocktail of drugs and disease. The panic starts to rise again, threatening to overwhelm me, and I turn to her, desperate to think of something, anything, else.

“Why do you?” I blurt out, my voice shaky.

“Smoke?”

“Yes.”

She shrugs. “Because I’m addicted.”

“Oh.”

“You were expecting a better answer than that.”

“I don’t know what I was expecting.”

“I know all the reasons to quit, believe me. The biggest reason being the damn lung cancer, of course. But I just can’t.” She eyes the cigarette again ruefully. The yellow-stained filter is all that is left, as she has smoked it down to the last millimeter. “I know it’s not the done thing to admit this,” she says. “But I like it. So help me, I actually enjoy it. I’ve been smoking them so long now I can’t imagine being without them.”

She throws the butt on the ground and grinds it into the dirt with a slippered foot. I notice that her sheepskin slippers are faded and worn, and the toenail on her right big toe has almost poked through in a bid for freedom.