Myra's Cigarettes
When I go up to the register to pay for our gas, I notice the attendant is staring out the window at Myra, checking her out. There's really no reason for this to annoy me, but it does anyway. She's leaning over the hood washing the bugs off the windshield, smiling to herself. Part of me thinks she knows the attendant is watching her and that just irritates me even more. But what annoys me the most is the fact that it even bothers me to begin with.
I pay for the gas and buy a pack of Camel Lights for Myra. I still have half a pack of American Spirits left, and I'm trying to conserve them until we find another gas station that carries them. I ask the attendant if he knows where I can get some, and he just shrugs and goes back to stocking the cartons of cigarettes behind the counter. It amazes me that they don't have my brand. It's a small gas station in the middle of nowhere, but they have more cigarettes than I've ever seen in any little outpost station like this. I watch him for a minute and do some quick math in my head. Twenty cigarettes in a pack. Ten packs in a carton. Three cartons in a row stacked fifteen rows high. That's nine thousand cigarettes, and that's just one brand. There are maybe fifty columns of cartons stretching across the entire back wall of the gas station, making four hundred fifty thousand cigarettes total. Almost a half million cigarettes! Just in this one little gas station! He and I are the only two in the building, which means the ratio of cigarettes to people in the building is…. two hundred twenty five thousand to one. Two hundred twenty five thousand to one!
I wonder if he's ever marveled at the sheer volume of cigarettes he handles daily. In a month he may personally sell over a million of those little sticks of rolled tobacco. I want to ask, to somehow strike up that conversation, but I know from the experience of too many odd sideways glances that people are seldom interested in my brand of observation. No one else seems to wonder how many semi-colons there are in the library or how many other people own the exact shirt you're wearing right now. We've been spoiled by mass production: the printing presses and the sweatshops and the lunar rovers are so commonplace now that we get to take them for granted. Our innate sense of awe has been deadened by an overabundance of awesomeness. 300 billion stars in the Milky Way? Bah, that's nothing. The night sky can't even hold a candle to how many units we shipped last quarter!
Why are we so narrow? What is it that makes us shy away from experiencing the boggling vastness of the universe around us? Is it too much to ask to want to revel in the grandeur of being with a fellow voyager?
Hmm.
Maybe it is. Maybe just because I happen to enjoy the experience of amazement and wonder doesn't mean there's anything wrong if other people don't. Who am I to judge him? Who am I to think that I'm the only one not sleepwalking? I walk back out into the sun and toss Myra's twenty cigarettes onto her seat. She doesn't thank me, but opens the pack and lights one up. She catches an ant making its way across the dashboard and carefully sets it down next to the gas pump. As the car pulls away, I turn back, squinting, and take one last glance at the attendant mindlessly stacking carton after carton of Marlboros. I dunno. Maybe I'm wrong, but I can't help but think that maybe I'm right.
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"The night sky can't even hold a candle to how many units we shipped last quarter!"
My favorite line. Nice piece.
You have a fairly laid-back way of writing that I like. Your narrator is a little obsessive about the small details. That stuff about counting the cigarettes gave it the comedy for me. I like lunacy. You can almost see the clock ticking over in this guy's head. He's almost certainly on the way to being a grumpy old bastard in later life. I'm forecasting that from the opinionated look he's got about him. But that's good. You can milk that for a lot of universal comedy. How he contrasts with Myra will probably be the key.
Great, obsessive vignette. Love the way this narrator reacts when they do not stock his brand of cigarette, then reflects in his rambling way upon things such as mass production and overabundance. The ending, where he observes the ant and the attendant in succession, seemed an intentionally placed metaphor. Though I haven't yet read the other "Myra" vignettes, this one was very entertaining; the title is ironic, however, as we only see Myra through the lens of the narrator and his thoughts/opinions.
I am really enjoying these Myra pieces. I actually read this a few days ago and didn't have time to comment. I find the unnamed narrator such a fascinating character, I love the way his mind works, as both Eamon and Marc pointed out, the obsessive quality to his thoughts - in an earlier piece, I think Myra, I commented that I really liked this narrator's laid-back quality interspersed with ruminations and philosophical tidbits, and, for the most part, the same applies here.
I adored the whole counting of the cartons, and tying it in to this little nothing gas station in the middle of nowhere, versus the number of people actually in it - was just tremendous.
For me the story lost its thread, when the narrator moves into his exposition on mass production, why are we so narrow, etc., I found it a bit distancing because the narrator's observations weren't tied more directly into the story unfolding, but felt a tad tacked on. I liked the observations, but perhaps I would have preferred them tied into the ongoing road trip these two seem to be on. Just my two cents.
Charis,
2 cents are always appreciated.