Your hands shake as you ease the driver's side door shut, eyes on Max, asleep in the other seat. She doesn't stir, curled up under your jacket. You watch her for a moment longer, taking in the way her bangs flutter with each exhale.
Then you turn away, chest tight, and dig a crushed carton of cigarettes out of your pocket. A wheezy 'shit' drops from your lips when the pack slips from your fingers and pops open on the ground, spilling cigarettes into the mud.
"Shit, fuck, shit," you hiss, kneeling and hurriedly trying to salvage them, guilt and fear and grief and a million other things you can't name tightening around your throat like a noose.
You have most of them picked up when you hit 'fuckit' and jam the end of a filter between your lips. You taste dirt and fumble with your shitty Bic, thumb slipping off the striker several times before you finally get it right. The small flame jumps in your unsteady hands, licking your fingers as much as the end of your cigarette, but it doesn't matter when the paper catches and you drag in smoke.
It washes over your tongue and burns your throat, burns away strands of rope wound around it. The smoke settles in your lungs like home, like black smoke billowing from fires that consume the shattered remains of all you've ever known, of all you've ever had.
Yet you live. You breathe. You feel wetness seeping into the knees of your jeans and the nip of the October breeze across your clammy shoulders.
You cough on the exhale, and the rope snaps back into place around your neck as you watch blue smoke catch fire in the amber glow of dying light.
You tried, you want to scream. You tried.
But since when has trying ever been good enough?
You flick your cigarette back into the mud and stand, shoving your hands in your pockets to hide their shaking. Your knuckles brush the torn, damp edge of a Polaroid.
Frustration boils beneath your skin, and you say, through grit teeth, to the black smoke and the rubble and the bodies in the streets so many miles behind you: "I'm not worth this much."
AN: I did a rewrite of this chapter because, well, the other version didn't really fit with the rest of the story. It didn't seem like a good enough introduction. This one still doesn't, but at least it isn't poetic prose while the rest of the chapters are straight up prose. Anywho, thanks for sticking around, sorry for the false alert, followers, and hopefully I'll have the new thing I'm working on up sometime in the next three weeks. Hit me up on tumblr at pa-writes if you want to talk about literally anything.