The Ghost and the cigarette

​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.

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THE GHOST AND THE CIGARETTE is available now.