Evil Grin

My car was the only one at the four way intersection. The traffic lights flashed red, telling me they were to be treated like a stop sign. This always happened with the street lights after nine o’clock. I had had a particularly stressful night. My ex-wife berated me for seven minutes, I counted, about letting our son skip school so he could get lunch with me. It was only gym class. And Tyler is already in cross country so it wasn’t like gym was very important for someone who ran five miles after school every day. My ex-wife had this tendency to start on one topic and quickly turn the conversation into a rant about every little thing she hated about me. Fighting her was useless, better to let her fizzle out. Like a fire that you let burn down, she was red coals as she shut the door in my face.

So here I was at this blinking stop light looking for a lighter. I kept my foot firmly pressed on the brake and opened the center console, flinging scraps of paper and fast food napkins around. No lighter. In a flustered thrust I shifted the car into park and opened the glovebox. There was a pocketknife, the spliff I needed to light, more scraps of paper, a tire pressure gauge, an expired condom, and a small pair of mittens. But no fucking lighter. I took the spliff out and held it between my finger and thumb. I ran it across my nose and smelled as deeply as I could, the fumes covered my brain like a blanket. The traffic lights kept flashing, urging me to get going. But I needed to light the spliff to get my ex-wife out of my head. Her voice rang around my head worse than the ringing of my tinnitus.