Cigarette Stories

From where she sat at a small round table in the center of the otherwise empty café a wave of quiet rippled outwards languidly in the heavy heat of the midsummer afternoon. I didn’t want to disturb the spell by entering the radius of that quiet, sitting down at a table not too near, and opening my notebook as was my wont in such places to write my own predilections. The book she read was beyond my ken as her exquisite fin...