​Normally, when asked to contribute a short story to a collection, my first response is to scramble for a polite way to decline. So, when Maya asked if I would be interested in putting together an illustrated anthology about a cigarette ghost, no one was more surprised than I to find myself saying yes.

​And I wasn’t the only one. Everyone I approached about the project found themselves immediately intrigued. The ghost and the cigarette. It is a collection of symbols that pulls at the creative subconscious…

​Smoke, the gateway to otherworld, the conduit to communication with the gods or the dead or our own deepest fears. Not just a conduit, but also a conductor, deadly in its own right, leaching the animate from our very lungs, blackening them, corrupting the core of our bodies until we can no longer draw in life from the air itself, smothering us.

​And yet smoke is also a telltale sign that at least once here there was life. For there was something to burn; there was fire. Fire that threatens, but also makes the complexity of human life possible. Fire gave us safety and community. Some even believe fire gave us language and story itself.

​And then there’s cigarettes. A symbol of humankind’s suicidal obsession with dancing on boundary between exhilaration and death. We have always flirted with the edge of existence, grinning victoriously down at the licking fires of the afterlife we believe cannot reach us. Though somewhere deep inside, we know we are lying to ourselves. Whether we push our bodies and minds nearly too far with our quest for career or for physical achievement or for artistic fulfillment, we taunt the Reaper. Until we slip, and he doesn’t.

​This is where the ghost haunts us. The reminder that there is no escape from that Reaper’s final blow. The ghost slips through the veil of smoke, no longer seduced by that tightrope walk mortals crave. The ghost reminds us of the eternal suffering that awaits after a life lived for selfishness alone. Or, too, it can tell of the love that can survive beyond the confines of the mortal coil, beyond the simplicity of feeble human logic. 

The ghost and the cigarette: that shifting, twisting place, just obscured from our vision. That place we know is there, though we try so hard not to acknowledge it. That place where death touches life…and life touches death.

Each author Maya and I have invited touched on this place in a different way. I invite you to join us by candlelight, by flashlight, or by firelight—a safe distance from stark reality. Sit down and part the pages. Let the dark narrow your vision.  Take my hand, or Maya’s, or Theodore’s, or another. Take that hand that reaches to you from beyond the smoke of one last cigarette, and let’s see for ourselves what lies beyond.

​Once upon a time…
 
Because isn’t that how all the best stories start? With once upon a time?
 
Once upon a time, two young mothers took gambles on their dreams. They created businesses in a quaint little downtown in a quaint little city called Hillsboro. One of these young ladies—we’ll call her Tonya—opened a soap and lotion business (Rustling Sage) and sold her wares in a charming boutique aptly named The Artfull Garden. The other young lady—we’ll call her Tina—opened a bookstore from the inventory she had amassed in her online bookselling.
 
This legendary bookstore was known as Jacobsen’s Books & More.

So Spake Mo…

It is an ancient story, a heartbreakingly familiar one.

Once upon a time in the high reaches of Tibet, a spare prince laid the foundations for a kingdom on the high cliffs north of the Indian Himalaya on the south bank of the Sutlej river. Tsaparang, the capitol city of the great Guge Kingdom, ruled largely unopposed from these highly defensible spires for nearly 700 years. As the Muslims swept through the surrounding lands, Guge grew with the influx of Buddhist refugees. Gifted artisans from the Far East, the Near East, and all the conquered lands between joined together in Guge to create a uniquely international mix of Buddhist art that can still be seen today on the walls Tsaparang’s great ruins.

So Spake Mo…
Albion. The name of the isle in the time of the Greeks gods, the isle populated by the sons of Albion, the giants.

Britian. The name of the isle in the time Trojans, when Brutus of Troy conquered the giants and settled there after years of war and exile, bequeathing it his name.

So Spake Mo…
Through an expanse of years, shattering a divide of incredible distance, I listened to words of Michael Wood last night. He served as my guide we traced over the British and French landscape, as we traced back into the legend of Arthur, the Once and Future King.

There is a place in the world where that is more true than any other, where the residue of ancient lives is thicker, richer in the dense, dry soil than anywhere else on earth. 
             
Wonderwerk Cave.
             
At the edge of the Kalahari Desert, this cave extends nearly a mile into the hillside with lives buried in the strata beneath your soles going down 20 feet into the earth. 

So Spake Mo…
Before an expanse of metal filament spanned the waters of the Columbia from her Oregon to her Washington shores, an ancient landslide served the First Peoples as a bridge from one side of the awesome gorge to the other.
 
Decade after decade the Columbia strained against this entrapment, slowly wearing away at the underbelly of The Great Crossover. The tribes of the First People knew it was fragile. They had their rules for its use to protect the many against its inevitable fall.
 
And many were the stories of its origins. In one story, it was the body of the defeated tyrant, Thunderbird, from the days of the animal people. In another, it was the gift of the Great Spirit for the people to ease their difficulty in crossing the great river. In yet another, it was offered as a peaceful point of connection between two quarreling brother chiefs and their tribes.

So Spake Mo…
Read enough legends and motifs begin to emerge: the lakes, the rivers, and seas, dangerous mysteries lie beneath those glittering depths, sacred secrets that can reveal the true nature of your very soul.
 
Take for example a young orphan boy taken in by the chief of a tribe of Blackfeet, a tribe that once roamed Alyse’s Montana home. This young orphan boy stood on the cusp of manhood, eager to take his place among the heroes of his people. He begged of his grandfather to tell him how make this crossing, how to bring greatness to his tribe.
 
Grudgingly, the chief shared with him an ancient legend. At the bottom of a lake, he said there were powerful spirits which kept the ponokamita, the elk dogs. Any warrior who could find a way to win these elk dogs would surely be remembered among his people.  How it would ease their burden to have these beautiful beasts to help carry their possessions, to aid them in the buffalo hunt!

So Spake Mo…

Twenty years. 
Twenty years since we shared the journey of childhood together, since the stories of our lives were so bound up in one another that we gave shape to each other, to
the people we would become. Amidst canyon and sagebrush, in the cradle of a
one-stoplight town, we began.