I am nothing now. I am a mere scrap of garbage, a burned-out, crushed-out, useless cigarette end, lying lost in the dust in a place where I do not belong, never belonged, in the red dirt of a worn-out middle school playground, back behind the utility shed, where no one can see me, where no one will see me, where eventually I will vanish back into the earth.

But I was so important just a few minutes ago. Allow me the impertinence of a little bragging, for I will soon be gone and you will never need to hear from me again, not ever, but I feel I can trust you with my story.

I helped a girl become a woman, yes I, inconsequential tube of dried leaves that I am. Don't underestimate me, just because now she has left me behind.

You see the things of her childhood here, little things, a few things. There is a lollipop wrapper she dropped on the ground, and there the little white stick the candy came on,cast down later. Ah, she litters! That was once her only vice.

There are her footprints in the dust, pretty little treads that scuffed the dry clay. Here is a damp spot where she spat ...

I wasn't hers in the beginning. I lay nestled in my pack on the store shelf like a caterpillar awaiting the bursting of its cocoon. I was warm and dark and the sweet smell of tobacco, my own scent, in the gloom was all I knew.

I heard the voices one day, high and sweet and fascinating, drifting down my way and I stirred from my slumber and wondered what was to be my fate. For one of them, one of her friends, one of these girls, snatched me up, my pack that is, on a lark, for a dare, for kicks.

Yes, stole me right out of the store, along with some cheap jewelry and candy. Nobody caught them and they got a rush. But I have a stronger thrill to offer, more abiding, surely. I would have my turn, my moment in the sun. I could be patient.

No one saw them slip behind the shed, three of them, little devils making the most out of middle school recess. I was third handed out, by that friend, handed out to her, extended from my pack, seeing the harsh sunlight for the first time ... and her.

Oh damnation of creation, she was beautiful. Oh gods that favor the earth with sun and rain, this was an angel, this was my goddess, this was to be my birth and death. She wore her golden hair in tight braids and she had eyes as blue as the morning glory blossoms in a Carolina tobacco field. She clothed herself in a simple tshirt and denim shorts, and all her curves had just begun to take shape, and I knew, in the way that we simple things of the earth know, that this vexed her a little, for she wanted to be a woman so badly and yet, she feared leaving the shell of her youth behind.

She had soft, pretty lips just starting to plump out like a grown woman's would. Clean, white teeth just freed from braces. And no blemishes yet marred the glow of her complexion.

I would see my future, my fate, in this moment revealed, for to those lips she raised a narrow fellow -- if you will pardon my paraphase of Dickens, fine poet that she was. A straw, that's what I meant, a clear straw, from which she sipped the last of some sweet soda, working those fine lips to pleasure her mouth, drinking in the final drops of juice. Then she smacked her lips and tossed the soda cup onto the ground and paid it no more heed. She nibbled on the straw a moment, forever marking it with the press of her teeth, then dropped it, too, and stepped upon it, and then looked at her friend, who was still holding out the pack of cigarettes.

"Wanna smoke?" the friend said, in that crude way of contractions that the young people follow.

Her eyes grew wide. I heard her giggle. Perhaps she was nervous, unsure, rolling over in her sweet mind all the just-so-no strategies they had crammed down her throat back in the school.

She took the cigarette. Took me, that is. Tugged me out of the pack. Dropped another one on the ground, never to be smoked, poor thing. Her fingers were tight in their grip, childish that way, but it felt good to me to be needed, wanted.

"Ever smoke before?" said the friend, who had already lit up and inhaled without a cough, and spewed a small plume of smoke into the air.

The girl, my girl, my angel, my goddess, nodded her head.

"I took a puff off my babysitter's cigarette once. When I was little."

"But you never inhaled, I bet," the friend said.

My angel's hands trembled as she put me into position, as she lifted me to her face. I was a bird before the sun, a supplicant, a servant in theophany to my divinity, and I sought union, blessed union, with her.

Her eyes were blinking, betraying her nerves. She wrinkled her nose, sniffing in the unfamiliar aroma I exuded, and some little part of me, a scattering of happy atoms, sailed up her nostrils into oblivion there.

Her mouth was open, yawning pink and wet before me, though her lips were dry, more of those nerves, surely. She licked her lips with the twisting prettiness of her tongue, left them moist and glistening. And suddenly I was thrust that way, my filter tip pressed into that perfect place, its fresh white paper laid upon the thin blanket of her lip gloss and warm girlish saliva, soaking up the faint taste of her strawberry soda, the not unpleasant memory of the fries and sandwich she had eaten moments before, and the nectar of her own mouth, the warm juices of her glands that whispered "girl" in musky wetness to me as they moistened my dry paper.

She clamped down hard and suddenly, uncomfortably tight, and I could feel the tip of her tongue scraping the end of my filter as somewhere out in the light, her friend held a flame to my tobacco and I began to burn.

Who can tell the strength in a woman's mouth, even in a girl's mouth? A two year old can bite to break the skin ...

"Suck in like a soda straw," the friend said. Crudities bother me, but my opinion doesn't matter, anyway. I would have said "draw me, sip me like wine." But what would my little blonde angel in denim shorts have known about wine?

I felt the mighty rushing wind of the intake of her breath -- a small sip of the earth's atmosphere, a bit of air borrowed for a moment, brought in sacrifice to the temple of her lungs, pink, perfect, pretty little lungs. I felt my flaming tip flare to a fierce glow, and felt my substance incinerate and multiply, felt this blast furnace change red tobacco into silver smoke, felt it pull into her mouth and dance upon her tongue.

It was bitter and she drew her saliva together and spat upon the ground, and some of the smoke was lost that way, but she dragged the rest down into her lungs.

Oh, what pleasures we had there -- close to the rapid beating of her young heart, heated by the close network of her life blood, sending our substance to all her tender organs, even into the golden reservoir of her nether regions, the fount of her waters.

But favored above all was the queen of our tribe, the fair lady nicotine who rushed headlong into union with the eager pleasure centers of the girl's brain, weaving the first strands of permanent desire even as she soothed the girl's nerves and touched her joy receptors.

Indeed, we embraced every cell in this ripe young body, from the tips of her painted toes to the slight, sweet, forbidden curve of her bottom to her blinking eyes, stinging a little in the smoke.

We did our best to be gentle, knowing we were first. We tempered our queen's lusty rampage, we tried to soften the harshness of the smoke, and we did well.

For she took three deep puffs with but one little cough, which indeed aroused the admiration of her two friends.

Perhaps I imagined it, but it seemed she stood taller, more confident, hardly the girl who had come to this place with strawberry soda in hand.

A boy appeared,a pathetic boy, to my estimation, but her heart surged and I knew she favored him. He stood and stared.

"You smoke?"

"Yeah," she said.

We were burning down now, but we summoned the last of our strength as she inhaled and he watched, as he teetered between repulsion and awe.

We shaped the smoke that she exhaled into a perfect creamy cone. We knew she had won him, now.

She let us go, dropped us to the ground as we had foreseen. We watched the sole of her shoe rise over us, a bittersweet moment, despising the parting from her and yet desiring in some part of us to die this way. She was little but we were smaller and there was strength in her and her sole ground down upon us, flattening our filter and crushing our burning cherry into ash, and grinding us back and forth in the close darkness, rubbing us into the dirt there.

We could faintly hear him asking a question, something about going out. She laughed.

"Maybe. Ask me on Thursday."

She walked away, and left him, and left us.