Let There Be A Light

by

William Kitcher

I miss the old days when you knew that a classic old joke would be understood by an audience. If a sketch comedy group performed while Schubert’s “Trout Quintet” was playing and concluded it with people slapping each other with fish, I’m sure that the audience would think it had something to do with Monty Python’s Fish-Slapping Dance, if, in fact, they actually knew who Monty Python were. Ah, sad times.

I miss the days when a cigarette smoker asked you for a match, and you could respond, “No one even comes close” or “Your face, my arse”, and receive a slight smile of recognition.

No, my friends, the times they are a-changin’, to quote a Nobel Prize-winning writer. Not many people use matches anymore.

To be honest, I miss the times when a lot of people smoked. I hardly ever smoke but sometimes I like to have one, and I’m not happy when I have to wander the streets for hours in order to find a person who smokes, and attempt to bum one. Buying a pack of cigarettes seems to defeat the purpose of being an occasional smoker.

It was one of those days when I felt like having a smoke. I managed to cadge a smoke from a guy on the street but he didn’t have a lighter or matches or a burning piece of wood, so I wondered what he was about.

I saw a guy leaning up against a wall, and he looked like he could have been a smoker, so I approached him, and said, “Hey, buddy, you got a light?”

Cleverly, he said, “Yep.”

“May I have one, please?” I asked.

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

“It’s at home, beside my bed. I need it for reading.”

“No. Not that kind of light. I meant... do you have a match?”

“Yep.”

“May I have one?”

“Nope,” he said.

“Why not?”

“My matches are at home, beside my bed. I need them for my candles.”

I couldn’t tell if his understanding of English was limited or his understanding of English was so good that he thought pedantic semantics were something clever. “Do you have a lighter?” I asked.

“Yep,” he said.

I started to wonder about the English language’s custom of putting the letter “p” on the end of short forms of “yes” and “no”. Why “p”? Why not “f” or “k” or, to get really bizarre, “w”? What would that even sound like?

But I was now jonesing for the smoke. I asked, “Could you give me your lighter?”

“Nope.”

“Why not? Is it at home?”

“Nope, I have it right here.”

“May I have it?”

“Nope. It’s mine.”

I moved closer to the wannabe-Socrates, and peered right through both of his eyes. “May I borrow it?” I sensed he was now feeling intimidated. After all, I’m a late-middle-aged man, five foot five, not completely bereft of hair, and with only 40% body fat.

“Yep, I suppose,” he said. “When will I get it back?”

I thought I had him then. I stepped back a pace, drew myself up to my full height, and put the cigarette in my mouth. I left it hanging on the corner of my lip, the way I’d seen Humphrey Bogart do it a number of times. I waited for a few moments to increase the tension. In those moments, I remembered that sometimes when you have a smoke dangling from your lips for a while, you can pull it away and tear off part of your lip at the same time.

But I was undeterred. In response to a question like, “When will I get it back?”, I was ready to be Bogart-cool, and I said, “Right after I light my smoke.”

“Yep,” he said. He sounded timid to me, like he was afraid to give me any grief or even attempt to stand up to me. He was completely under my control.

He passed his lighter to me. I took it from him without removing my gaze from his eyes, which I now realized were different colours, like some demented border collie.

I adjusted the smoke in my mouth, ripping off only the slightest layer of lip. I flicked the lighter, and it didn’t flame. I thought I’d just made a mistake.

I flicked it again. Nothing. And again.

“This doesn’t work,” I said. “It’s out of butane.”

“I know,” he said.

I looked up at him and said, “Why do you carry around a lighter that doesn’t work?”

“Why do you smoke?”

 

Since his first appearance in Worthing Flash in February 2021, Bill has also been published in Australia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, India, Singapore, and South Africa, so he’s getting very close to world literary domination. A Nobel Prize is not in his future.