She asked me if I had a cigarette. As I stood next to the door. Lingering in the outside moments. When my apartment heats up like a fire-storm from the setting sun. I said no. I didn't. And I wondered if other people understood the way methamphetamines smell coming off of another person. When we used to call them amph. But when most people now generally refer to them as meth. Dirty dish water and overused air. The way Sonya used to smell. The prostitute who lived two doors down from Paul and I when we lived in something we called 'the rent' so many years ago. She was only there for a few weeks. Her pink stained cheeks. Paul used to call her the dusty-orchid. I doubt she was more than twenty. Probably a snide remark about what her over-used cunt looked like after too many payed-for-fucks. As if he would have known what it was like to stick his prick inside a woman, anyway. I called him tonight, but he wasn't home. And I didn't leave a message. Only left the line open long enough for the machine to register the hang-up. They don't have caller-id. Sonya. That's what we called her. In whore terms it could or could not have been her name. I'm not sure that I cared. The thought occurs to me as the crazy cigarette woman moves in jerky rhythms away from me. Like the texture of being drunk and high and losing sense of when and if the pavement might connect back up with the soles of the feet. That I know this. That I've no idea about the scent of orchids.