Adventures in Bad Writing

The night was drunk with the scent of fresh-baked bread and a monstrously odorous carne asada burrito. I lit a cigarette under the screaming light of a full moon, marrying the scents in a haze of twilight smoke outside a bar filled with vampires. I washed down the mouthful of burrito with a drink from my vodka which burned in conjunction with hot sauce. It was a strange burn, a burn like none other.

A man approached me from within the bar. “Hey, can I bum a smoke?” he asked with an indelible persistence, like the migration of a species, or Jupiter’s Red Spot. I had to think faster than a cheetah runs as it would have been impossible for me to hand him a smoke with one hand full of burrito and the other full of vodka. I decided the burrito had been eaten enough to where I could hold it in my mouth and leave it hanging out like an enormous tongue, freeing one hand to pull out the pack of cigarettes in my back pocket and offer this man a smoke. “Thanks,” he said standing there watching me wrestle the burrito from my mouth.

The burrito was mashed and gnarled as though it had been mauled by a rabid dog who thought it was a cat covered in peanut butter. I was filled with a deep sorrow; the burrito reminded me of my mother. She had been sick with the flu for days now. “Got a light,” the man with the iron resolution asked me.

“Sorry, I don’t,” I said panicked, not wanting to suffer through anymore burrito-mouth madness. I walked away into the screaming moonlight through a drunken night dancing in the scent of fresh baked-bread and yellow puffs of cigarette smoke pushed from behind my lips with my under-worked diaphragm. I never found out if that smoking man found a light. I surmise he did. I hope he did.