• It was cold outside, but Brooke didn’t seem to notice. She was too busy digging the lighter she kept hidden in the cracks between the crudely constructed wooden walls of her too-old house. When she found what she wanted, she smiled, although there was really nothing to smile about. She dug a cigarette out of the pack she had bought a week ago. Brooke didn’t smoke as much as she used to. It was bad for the baby.


    She had been thinking; thinking about her boyfriend Larry’s staunch refusal to relocate from this backwater town to one of the more upscale, party-oriented cities to the North and South. They had had an argument about it earlier in the day. “I know this isn’t the fanciest house, but this is where we live. This is our home,” he had said, “and I don’t intend to go through the stress of relocating with a baby on the way.” And that had been it. Larry always used the baby to win arguments.


    As she watched the smoke rise to the overhang of her front porch, she thought of it as some kind of metaphor for her dreams: Burning, rising, before hitting a ceiling and dissipating. She became very depressed about this and ended that train of thought.


    Her mind wandered back to her relationship with Larry. It was a fairly traditional one: Not wholly satisfying, but a social crutch to lean on. She wanted desperately out, but, like Larry said, with a child on the way, she had a responsibility. She kept these kind of thoughts from Larry, not because she was afraid of raising a child alone, (After all, her mother had done it with her, hadn’t she?) but because the truth of the matter was that Larry was a decent person. Brooke simply found him dreadfully boring and unattractive of late.


    Again, the train suddenly switched rails, and she found herself thinking of her years in high school. In those days she had been fairly popular. She had had many friends, most of whom she had not kept in touch with through her college years. But there was one person she had been talking to for the past month. One night she had even made arrangements to leave Larry and stay with Ronnie, her high school sweetheart. But that was the night she found out she was pregnant. All of her plans were put on hold. Most of them were ruined outright.

    She watched as the smoke seemed to cloak her from the outside world, shielding her from dreaded Responsibility, and she smiled again for a moment, a smouldering fire reflected in her eyes. What brought her back to reality was the sudden burning sensation against her leg. She went into her old house, put on a heavy coat, and walked into the night. As she stepped down from the front porch, she finally lit the cigarette that had been dangling from her mouth for the past ten minutes. She threw the rest of the pack on the rising flame that was engulfing the patio, and stepped into her unlocked car. She thought for a moment about where she was going, and decided. It was time to talk to Ronnie, woman-to-woman.