"A Daisy Bent" by Samantha Szumloz

A Daisy Bent

Here is the silence I so crave, secreted in a tube of tobacco. I breathe in the smoke, allow its gray reek to fill my throat, and exhale it out into the drizzly air while staring across the dark driveway of my father’s home. When the smoke leaves me, I hear the neighborhood men behind me talk, hear them chortle and yell and spill beer in the garage. I am the only pair of tits at their testicle gathering tonight, which makes me more reserved, guarded. 
“Slow down, girl!” one of them yells out to me, “cancer’s a real thing!”
“Want me to light another for you?” another asks me. “Never thought you smoked.” 
When I was young and had no vices, I held onto backwards ideas of people who smoke — stereotypes upon stereotypes upon stereotypes. They are the pervy uncles sitting on their front porches at ten o’clock at night coloring their lungs black. They are the acne-covered fast food workers leaning against cement walls and sucking on cancer sticks during their lunch breaks. They are the fallen crack addicts floating past cars on the highway, their ripped clothes smelling of burning buildings. I thought cigarettes made people’s souls rot from the inside out like tomatoes. I wasn’t rotten, would never be rotten, will never be rotten. I was sweet and preserved as sugar. As I got older, however, I realized that I wasn’t made of sugar. I was a person, like everyone else, and people are made of blood and hurricanes of fears that may never be soothed by Our Fathers. That’s why I smoke, to self-soothe. 
So when the man says “never thought you smoked,” I know what he means. A flower like myself would never smoke. A flower like myself would never destroy herself. A flower like myself would never put toxins in her body, because god forbid I wilt. God forbid my petals fall. God forbid I reveal my dirt-caked roots to the bees.  
I smoke the rest of the cig and flick away the burning butt, stomping it on the ground, diminishing the red glow of the ash. If I had an extra tit, I would turn around, eye the man, and say, “Fuck off.” But I don’t say that. I won’t, and I can’t. Instead, I become the silence I so crave, pretending not to hear the men as they snicker and whisper that I have a stick up my ass. I wish I had a stick up my ass. I wish I had a stick so I could throw it like a javelin, throw it so far across the driveway that it nicks one of the neighbors’ trucks. Just a nick, a small nick. A nick so small that no one can sue. 
God knows my mind is a nick on my image. 

Samantha Szumloz

Samantha Szumloz is a poet and fiction writer pursuing a BA in Writing Arts at Rowan University. Her work has appeared in publications such as MORIA’s thirteenth issue, Blue Marble Review’s thirty-fifth issue, DisLit Youth Literary Magazine, and R U Joking?. She lives in central New Jersey with her family. 

Headshot: Samantha Szumloz

Photo Credit: Staff