Hereditary
Smoking kills.
by Jay C. Alexander
But don’t get so ahead of yourself. Standing inside the tiny corner store near your place—the one with candy, condoms, lottery tickets, and bus passes—you stare at the cigarette options in front of you. Yes, you could get the white and gold pack; they were your father’s favourite when he’d send you to buy them decades ago. Something about their smell, he’d say. Yeah, they smell like shit, you think. They also smell like him and that makes you nauseous. The white and red pack is a classic—so classic the clerk has almost run out of them, and you take it as a sign to pick a different brand. When you check the bottom row, you find a new design: black and red, with the typical warning label on top, and a photograph taking centre stage. God, that’s beautiful. It’s not like the other brands that use actors or medical illustrations, afraid of being too honest and scaring children, their future customers; no, this picture is real, very real, and you can feel it deep in your gut. It’s an open chest—a man’s, you assume—with a heart too orange and too grey to supply the right amount of blood. The muscle looks floppy. The owner looks dead. Without hesitation, you grab the pack, pay ten euros for it, then leave the shop. The first hit of nicotine is almost as arousing as the heart in your hands.
By the time you get to your flat, your excitement’s too hot to ignore. The four walls of your studio can barely contain your exhilaration as you undress, throw your clothes onto the unmade bed, and close the smoke-stained windows. Check the locked door once, twice, thrice. Your roommates—those disembowelled little animals you saved from the streets and later examined—watch you from their perches on the floor. Now bare, you approach your shelf, where all your other packs stand at attention. Some are newer, some are older. The more recent packs feature the best photographs—rotting teeth, venous masses, tar-like bronchioles—but still, the older, more cartoonish ones work just as well. The heart gets placed in the middle, between the black lungs and the missing tongue. Your left hand reaches for a cigarette and sticks it between your lips, lighting it with your trusted Zippo. Your right hand moves down until it’s wrapped around your hard dick. With each inhale, you stroke thrice, and with each exhale, you squeeze once. It takes you only a few minutes to finish all over your hand. After more puffs of the cigarette, you reach its butt and stub out the scalding embers on the side of your hip, adding another faint mark to your collection. Part of you wonders if they’ll notice when they examine your body. The pathologist may write about the dozens of scars on your skin, both the ones made by you and those made by others, or they may photograph them for later use, in a medical journal or one of those pornographic warnings. Another man may jerk off to the pictures of your cancerous kidneys. The thought alone makes your dick twitch alive again, but you ignore it for now.
As you move into your bathroom, you light up a second cigarette, letting it hang loosely from your lips. The bulb in the ceiling takes a few seconds to flick on. Standing in front of the mirror, you wash the cum off your hands before beginning your examination: your eyes look fine, though they’re a bit dry; pulling your mouth open you find nothing other than the familiar brown lines around your teeth and the white coat on your tongue; you palpate your neck like you’ve seen doctors do, trying to find a new mass under your skin, but there’s none; the lump of fat right above your flat abdomen doesn’t hurt when you poke at it, as it’s not quite deadly yet. It’s not the amount of progress you had been expecting. A sigh turns into a cough. You take another puff, still staring at your reflection.
Your dick’s gotten shorter. Ever since puberty, you’ve been quite well endowed in that department, at least according to what other men have told you. Large, thick, with a nice curve, and a bush you never really bothered shaving. It’s a distraction, anyways. Men should focus on your true beauty instead. If your memory serves you correctly—though it’s been more than a decade since you last saw your father’s—you’re now smaller than him. He’d like it that way. You grimace.
The rest of the night is spent smoking and arranging the packs in a mosaic, using their pictures to create a small and rotten Frankenstein’s monster—your son. He looks just like you. He has your love’s blue eyes and your father’s limp heart. Your father died ages ago, when you were still a teenager; his arteries clogged from years of guilt, fat, and smoke, stopping his heart in the middle of the night, ending his life with an unremarkable thud. You remember hearing the commotion from your bedroom, your right hand caught mid-movement under your shorts, left hand covering your mouth to muffle your moans and sobs. He was only forty-seven years old. You’re thirty now, which means you have seventeen years left to die—oh, to die younger than your father and prove you’re the better man. Because you are the better man. You’ll let him know when you reunite in whatever afterlife waits for you. Hell, most likely. Before you know it, you smoke through the entire pack, and go searching for another in your main hidden stash. And your second hidden stash. And your third hidden stash. You check under the rotting animals, inside your son, behind your desk. Finally, you realise you’ve run out of cigs.
It’s not the first time, so you don’t panic, at least not too much—you simply get dressed, grab your wallet and pocketknife, and leave your flat once again. The air in the city feels light so late at night, or so early in the morning, depending on whom you ask. The only people with you on the street are the homeless and the junkies, all too focused on their own vices to bother you while you’re itching. Good. You pass by Isaac, the dopehead behind your building, lying completely still in his usual corner. He smokes crack when he’s got the money, and cigarettes when he doesn’t. He’s almost as good at smoking as you are. A few minutes later, you reach the small corner store again, greeting the clerk who probably knows you better than his own children. He’s seen you visit with your father, he’s seen you mourn and miss and curse your father, he’s seen you quit cold turkey and go through withdrawals, and most importantly, he’s seen you grow from a beautiful boy to a beautiful man. You don’t greet him, because he still sees your father in you—instead, you walk towards the cig section, searching for a good number of packs that’ll last you a few days.
He finally ran out of the white and red variety, and he’s also out of the white and gold variety, even if they smell like shit. The black and red ones you saw are gone, too. There are green cannabis ones, but they’re too expensive and definitely not your style; there are nicotine-free brands, which sound like the stupidest thing to ever be created; there are disposable vapes in a corner, but you know they’re only for quitters and children. When you question the clerk, he says he’s out of your cigarettes until the next delivery. How is that even possible? The clerk simply shrugs at your question, a little sorry he can’t help with the ants that are already crawling all over your skin. You don’t know many smokers in the area who you can ask for an extra cig. But you remember Isaac, napping behind your building, and you quickly walk out of the shop in search of your competitor.
Isaac’s still right where you last saw him—lying on the ground, arms weirdly twisted, hair a matted mess. He’s high on some bullshit. He looks like he belongs in your roadkill collection. You kneel next to him, hands petting and groping his body in search of a box. Then, you find it: a single cigarette, stashed inside his back pocket, rumpled and soggy on what must be sweat. Using your shirt, you dry it before sticking it in your mouth and lighting up. As you take the first few puffs, you look at Isaac again, noting the now-drying drool around his mouth. His eyes are slightly open, but they’re not moving under his eyelids, not at all. You press your fingers against his jugular. Thank God, you sigh, he’s still alive, though barely. His chest weakly moves up and down; his heart struggles to beat. He must be nearing death. The man is in his mid-twenties, and his vices are about to kill him. Now he lies in front of you, dying, rotting, younger.
It hurts more than you expect. No matter how hard you try, there will always be someone who does it better than you—someone who can kill themselves without struggling, someone who can become free without even trying, someone who manages to be more beautiful: in this case, Isaac. You only hope you can win the race against your father. And so, taking another puff, you begin your examination: his irises have a light blue ring around their natural brown colour; half his teeth have fallen out, but he doesn’t need new crowns, for he’s a king already; his lips are dry and cheeks necrosed; your hands run down his chest, and you can feel his ribs under his skin; his veins bulge out; his nails have disappeared; you’re sure that if you took off his socks, you’d find rotting toes; if you cut him up, you’d find rotten lungs, rotten kidneys, a rotten heart. The spitting image of your son back home. Such a young man, decaying in such a beautiful and perfect way, with nobody to appreciate what remains of his soul. You realise he must be hiding something. He must’ve figured out the key to achieving this level of decay; and you, in your thirty years, haven’t. Your dick is hard again, pressing against the dirty fabric of your jeans, and you struggle to ignore it. Deep inside, you wish you had the bastard’s body. You grind the cigarette on his skin before it can completely burn out and he twitches awake.
Isaac coughs—his cough deeper than yours—and sits up. Quickly, your hands envelop his shoulders to help him move. He folds over himself like his weight is too much to carry. You hook your elbows under his armpits and take a deep breath, pulling him up to his feet, letting his body press heavily against yours. He weighs a lot for a famished man, though your own malnourished muscles may be the reason you struggle to carry him. You’ve never been a strong man—your father always mocked you for it, but now you know he was right about your strengths. Breaths timed with steps, you drag him back into your building, pausing only when you think he stops gasping. He doesn’t, not yet. Your flat is on the second floor and the elevator is out of service. You struggle to haul him up the stairwell. Once inside, you make sure the door is locked, then check a second time just in case, and a third time for good luck. You let Isaac land on his back, right in front of your son’s shrine, surrounded by the other dead animals. Breathless, you stand in front of him.
You watch.
Still incredibly high, Isaac clutches the top of his shirt. He bites his left hand. He fights against an invisible force that presses down on his ribcage. With your eyes locked on his face, you move down until you’re straddling his hips, pressing your hands against his chest to feel his heart struggle to pump blood through his weakened body. You decide to help him relieve the pressure: with your pocketknife, you cut his shirt open, revealing the dry skin of his midsection. His secrets are hiding inside. If only you could reveal them all. The tip of the knife is too dull to cut his skin properly, but still you press it hard against his sternum, feeling it drag along the bone as you cut a line down the centre of his chest, wanting to see the heart underneath. Blood immediately pools at the cut and slides down the sides of his torso. You try digging your fingers into the incision to pry it open, but it won’t work. Of course it won’t work. It’s never that easy.
Quickly checking his face to make sure he’s alive, you position the knife over his abdomen, slicing the meat there instead. It takes various swipes to cut through the skin, and the fat, and the muscle, and whatever else stands between you and Isaac’s insides, until the red sea of blood finally parts and you see a hint of his greying intestines. They look just like your son’s. Your touch is featherlight as you run your fingers over the wet, squirmish organ. The bloody fabric of your jeans is a nice sensation against your erection. When you look at Isaac’s face again, his eyes—light blue like your father’s—stare at the ceiling, unblinking. His chest has stopped moving. Isaac lies dead in front of your son’s altar, and you can’t help yourself from where you’re straddling him, not anymore. You lean down until you’re pressed chest to chest, letting his blood soak your clothes. Arms wrapping around his waist, you put your ear to his left breast, trying to listen to his rotten heart. You hear only your own. Still, you stay where you are, hugging the dead man as his blood pools on your wooden floor. Your fingers draw small circles on the back of his shirt. He’s still warm enough to feel alive. Deep breaths leave your lips, but you hold back tears, because you have no right to cry.
You wonder if your father looked like this when he lay cold on the pathologist’s table. Perhaps his heart was weaker, or his craving stronger than yours. With small movements, you grind your crotch against Isaac’s thigh, relieving some of your own pressure. You are the better man. You’d never do this to the living, like your father did. Isaac’s blood makes the movements easier, wetter, more intimate. Your son watches from his shrine. Rub, rub, rub. When you start feeling close, you stand up. You can’t stop yourself. You undress again, not bothering to wash your hands. You grab the half-burnt cigarette and light it up once more. Inhale. You hope you look just like that, maybe worse—gross enough that other men will see your true beauty, and not focus on your soft skin or thick lashes. They’ll use you, and fuck you, and enjoy your body in ways your father will never get to again. You hope you’ll finally become a man. Three strokes. There’s no telling of what made you like this, and there’s nothing you can do about it. The nicotine will only quench your thirst until your body starts craving another hit. Exhale. You might’ve been born this way—gotten it from your father’s side, not only your eye for beauty, but your need, too. And now that he’s dead, there’s no one to blame. One squeeze. You hated when he smoked around you.
And you finish. And you put the cigarette out. And you’re still your father’s son.
I was on a road trip with my mother when we drove past a big Smirnoff ad. See, in the DR, all alcohol ads require a printed warning that alcohol is bad for your health, but the warnings on cig packs are so tiny I’ve never even noticed them. I recalled my younger years, when I’d fly to Spain with my father and watch him buy those cig packs with ugly and disgusting warnings on them, and thought to myself, what if a character became obsessed with those?
Jay C. Alexander is an artist from the Dominican Republic. Ever since they were a kid, they have explored storytelling in Spanish and English in many different mediums, including short stories, novels, poetry, plays, and scripts. They’ve also messed around with visual arts, music, theatre, and just about any kind of art you can name. Their stories have only appeared in their mind and their notebooks, but there’s always a first time for everything. Jay is currently an online SCAD student majoring in both film and television and dramatic writing. Every once in a while, they’re busy getting people coffees at their TV internship. And no, Jay doesn’t smoke. Find them on IG: @jay.c.alexander.