Anna

            She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, the pathetically smoldering end of her cigarette suddenly turning a menacing red. Retrieving the cigarette from between her lips, Anna sat poised, examining the ravenous appetite of the fire making its way up the slender column. She was savoring the smoke, the way it licked at the edges of her lungs and curled within her throat. Finally, she collapsed back into her seat and exhaled upward in one steady stream, carelessly flicking the cigarette over a stale ashtray.

            She wasn’t looking at anyone in particular and we all remained silent. Anna took another drag and closed her eyes; the eyeliner above her right eye was badly smudged. Her skin was so pale you could see the trail of blue veins cascading and twisting down her eyelids. Her wrist jerked mechanically over the ashtray again.

I let my eyes wander from her face down to her hand and finally settle on the pitiful tray. Cigarettes, like discarded bodies, lay strewn all across its bed. Some showed signs of real distress, laying at odd angles and creased at the edges like an accordion. Others you could tell had been unnecessarily sacrificed; snuffed out with still plenty of perfectly good tobacco left. Suddenly they were all being swept away, flung into the corners to form unintelligible piles of twisted paper in a sea of gray ash. Anna was stamping out her last cigarette.

            “Fuck.” She uttered in a tired monotone voice.

            The girl sitting next to her lifted eyes and smirked. “What’s with you?”

            Anna and I could both tell her smile was mocking, but her eyes seemed genuine, naïve. Only foreigners could pull off such an air. But there was nothing to say. She wouldn’t understand.

            An answer, nevertheless, was delivered in due time. Running her fingers recklessly through her hair and down her face, all the while rubbing away the last bit of integrity her eyeliner had tried to cling to, Anna heaved a great sigh and answered matter-of-factly,  “Everything’s fucked.”

            “Everything?” Came the automatic reply, that teasing smile and almost bewildered gaze foreigners sometimes get when they’re afraid they’re not understanding something.

            This was ignored. Snatching up the carton only to come to the depressing realization that there were no more cigarettes, Anna again slouched back into her chair and promptly asked in a derisive tone, “What so, are we going, or what?”

            I seized the opportunity and quickly stood up. “We’re going.” I answered decisively. The foreign girl quickly scuttled to follow our lead, a wry smile on her lips from probably still trying to figure out why everything was fucked.

            We walked out into the darkness and felt the promise of winter lingering in the air. I gave an involuntary shudder, and flipped up the collar of my leather jacket.

            “Where are we going?” The foreigner wanted to know.

            “Nowhere.” Came the reply.

            And so we went. As we walked down dark deserted streets and twisted our way through fowl shortcuts reeking of urine and alcohol, only the uniform sound of our feet hitting the pavement broke apart our otherwise languid silence.

            Anna fell behind to bum a smoke and I drew in line next to the foreigner. Sensing my presence she fixed me with a playful smile. “So.” She said, her soft accent somehow managing to make itself known in even those few letters. “How are you?”

            It was too simple, out of place. I laughed. She grinned too, knowing full well its futility in our present context, but pleased with my response nonetheless.

            “Well?” She goaded me.

            “The hell with it. Everything’s fucked.”

            “So it seems.” She said with that same wry smile.

            Anna caught up with us and I strolled on ahead a bit further. The foreigner had begun to inquire after mutual friends. She was digging, thirsty for conversation. After dangling countless opportunities to set records straight, Anna finally took the bait and began to rain story after story down on her. I kept off to the side, catching snippets of our shared narrative here and there. Every tale seemed to be booby-trapped with a dozen others as the foreigner struggled to piece Anna’s life together from the jumbled array of anecdotes and frequent asides.

            The foreigner’s genuine confusion as well as interest was the perfect fuel for Anna’s storytelling. “Wait, why would he do that?,” and “I thought she loved the other guy,” and my personal favorite, “Holy shit.”

            The night passed like this and at one point we found ourselves leaning over the edge of a bridge, watching the black water rock ceaselessly to and fro, to and fro. Anna, I could tell, was growing bored of her own voice.

            “Well, in short, fucked. Everything’s fucked.”

            “Mmm.” Was the only reply that came from the foreigner this time.

            I watched her as she gazed out over the water.

            “I mean really fucked.” Anna continued, just for the sake of saying it.

            “Well it could always be worse.” The foreigner answered quietly.

            “And it’s been worse, and it’s only getting worse…” Anna railed on.

            I continued to study the foreigner; she was listening patiently, nodding in concern and laughing at the moments of dark humor. But as I watched her I noticed the tired creases under the eyes, the way her fists were jammed in her pockets and her arms clung furiously to the sides of her body to stay as warm as possible. And yet there was that mocking smile and refusal to accept everything as fucked, that dangerous naivety.

            I offered her my coat and she declined, firm in her resolve. Foreigners. I thought bitterly.

            We started up walking again and this time Anna walked alongside me. She was telling me her plans for the next few weeks. They were chockfull of grandiosity, of if-this-works-out-then-this scenarios, but Anna rarely dwelled on the hopeful, it was better to understand and expect reality.

            “It should all work out. But you know, before it does, something is going to fuck things up.”

            “The hell with it.” I responded vacantly.

            We finally decided to part ways and I saw the relief in the foreigner’s eyes at the prospect of going home. I went my way and the foreigner went hers. Expecting Anna to follow, the foreigner called back to Anna’s idling figure. “Where are you going?”

            I heard Anna’s answer cut loud and clear into the crisp early morning. “Nowhere.”

            And then there was nothing more than the trudge of shoes bearing down on the pavement.

*This is a work of fiction, based on real people.