Short fiction

She is sixty-five, smokes three and a half packs a day, regularly applies Lancome lipstick, and has two friends. They died. Emily lay in bed listening to the beeping sound of her monitor. She had been admitted to Oxford Mississippi's area hospital after falling down her front steps. She laughed when she saw the no-smoking sign hanging outside her door. Emily took up the habit at the age of 12 in her pink bathroom, while living in North Dakota, believing that a cigarette before trampling out into the snow was good for the soul. The layers she wore to bear the cold always muffled the smell of the smoke. Emily's parents were successfully naïve; she was never caught.