The smoker will run out of cigarettes today. She first appeared on the news on my sixteenth birthday, about a week ago—her and her pile of ashes. They show the same establishing shot of her every morning: she’s in front of a busted-looking convenience store across town, the ashes on her right, a gradually dwindling supply of cigarettes in a paper bag on her left. She’s spoken to the journalists just once: “I’ll keep smoking,” she told them on the first day, “for as long as we’re on the moon doing our killing.” Every morning, I mark the ash pile’s height on my TV screen with a Sharpie.
Today, the screen can no longer contain the ashes.
