Semi Fiction: Ritual

The clunky, slightly dusty ovehead fan whirred noisily above their heads as they sat in the heat of the late afternoon. Outside, the air was still and stifling, carrying almost all of the sounds the kids made in the school nearby inside. It had been a long day.

She reached nervously for the pack of cigarettes on the table, seemed to think about it, took it anyway, and shook a single one into her hand. With a calm, practiced efficiency, she rolled it between her fingers and began twirling it once, twice, three times. She looked at the cigarette for a few seconds before bringing it to her nose, inhaling deeply and then replacing the unlit fag into the pack.

His bewildered look was evidently amusing, more so since his right hand was frozen in the act of proferring her a lighter. As it was, it now stood hovering over the surface of the table, elbow bent and fingers splayed out in a now almost comical gesture as he grasped the bottom end of the device.

No wonder she was laughing. "I stopped smoking three years ago," she said, after he'd withdrawn the hand and placed it into a somewhat un-funny position.

"So why the cigarette pack?"

The laugh, again. "It's a ritual I developed over the years. Somehow when I do that, it helps me feel better, especially when I'm stressed out."

"Must be the smell of the tobacco," he ventured. She was looking outside, lost in her thoughts and he was about to repeat the sentence when she simply said "It's the actions. It's always the actions."

-----------------------

Much, much later, he wondered about the nature of rituals and routines in people's lives as he walked the rain drenched street. A lucky pen, the sequence of steps when logging into a PC at home, the twirling cigarette, the breakfast spot, the visit to the mall.

Rituals, he thought, allow us to maintain sanity in a world that seems to have the consistency of jelly and mud, where every fresh wash seems like a new reboot, and nothing ever really makes it into secondary storage, unless you count the one we carry in our heads. We generate personal memes all the time, but only a few make it to that unconscious, programmed state that ultimately differentiates each and every other dreamer out there.

"So we make our own realities," she told him before she left. "Sometimes they're not much better, and sometimes they're even worse, but hell it's good to know I'll still have this no matter what reality I dream up. You know, to remember what it's like to be me."

And that, he concluded, was perhaps the single biggest reason for any ritual. Ever.