From Word To Word

The pipe tobacco was stale and dry, quick to light, quick to burn, acrid on my tongue, and I could take no pleasure in it, though I filled my mouth with its burning until I could feel the nicotine at the base of my skull, and then I tamped the still glowing dottle onto the stone of the stairway, bright embers, like red and angry stars, and I tamped them out, one by one, with the bowl of the pipe, and I let the scotch cover the smoke’s bitterness, for a moment, and when I could taste it again, it was mixed with peat and oak and alcohol and something I could not name, like a face in a dream that has filled the whole of the night and left it resting on my tongue.