We have a tradition at NDQ to always make sure that the first piece from an issue that appears on the NDQ website is the LAST piece that appears in the issue. This our little effort at ritual inversion (think: carnival, just two months late). It also makes sure that a brilliant story, like Ben Roth’s “A Brief Excerpt from the History of Tobacco” doesn’t get overlooked as the last thing to appear in NDQ 91.1/2.

It’s so much of what short fiction can be.  

A Brief Excerpt from the History of Tobacco

A rusted-out pickup truck pulled into the convenience store parking lot. That the man wore no shoes was not a problem, as he would send his long-beleaguered wife in. “Cigs,” he spat out lazily, not as command, much less request, but brute half-word fact. She looked into his eyes, her face a question of whether she could again prove her love for this man. “Reds,” he replied, and gave her a twenty, leaving the car running. She opened the door, planted her feet to pavement unconfidently, and chimed her way inside. Quashing the desire to peruse the magazines, and maybe the bottles of pink wine, she joined the three-deep line at the register, knowing that he would try to monitor her efforts for signs of disloyalty or waning commitment through the multiple panes of dirty glass: windshield and front of convenience store. Just as the teenager before her received his candy bar and change, and her opportunity was at hand, she fatefully looked to her right and saw him, the cowboy of aisle two. He tipped his hat and called her “ma’am,” smiling in a cowboyish way, and so the long-beleaguered wife abandoned her place in line, forgot the man and his rusted-out pickup, and accompanied the cowboy of aisle two out the back door to and then on his horse. As they rode west into multiple sunsets, she learned that he did not smoke, did not drive a pickup, and spoke in not only complete words, but even full and syntactically correct and sometimes complicated sentences. He learned that she was long-beleaguered, did not always like to wear shoes, and had something of a taste for pink wine. She contributed her twenty dollars, daily labor, and eventually three children to their ranch, where they led a long and mediocre life, during which she did not have to remind herself that mediocre just meant average, even if it sounded worse, as anything even approximating an average life is all that she had ever hoped for. She died with the cowboy and their three grown children beside her, while the man in the rusted-out pickup, long out of gas and increasingly thirsty, wondered what was taking so goddamn long already.

after Venita Blackburn

Ben Roth teaches philosophy at Emerson College. His fiction has been published by Nanoism, Flash, Blink-Ink, Sci Phi Journal, Aesthetics for Birds, Cuento Magazine, 101 Words, decomp journal, Bodega Magazine (nominated for a Pushcart Prize), Gambling the Aisle, Sensitive Skin, Euphony, Your Impossible Voice, Quibble, The Bookends Review, and Drunken Boat.

91.1/2