The skinny old punk was up to something. She blended in with the usual crowd at Wart’s: saggy gauged earlobes, sunbleached neck tattoos, ratty Bundeswehr jacket, the PBR can that looked like she’d been born holding it. But Nikki was certain: something was weird about her.
It was Tuesday, around 2 a.m. Fart Baby was playing to an empty bar. Nikki was pouring herself a shot when she spotted the woman sitting at the corner table, not listening to the band, not talking to anybody, not looking at her phone. She just sat and smoked for hours. Sometimes she’d glance under the table or over her shoulder. Exactly the same as the two previous nights.
On Wednesday Nikki pointed her out while Israeli Piss Play was setting up. J-Mack shrugged, said she paid her cover. At closing time Nikki noticed the woman had left a pack of cigarettes on the floor by her table. She trotted to return them, receiving for her trouble a look of anger and…disappointment?
Thursday was Nikki’s day off, but she showed up anyway, when DJ Rat-Brain was spinning. The woman was at her table in the same crust-punk clothes, unsmoked cigarettes littered at her feet.
Nikki slid into the booth. “Hi!”
“Not dating right now. Sorry.” The woman’s voice clicked like an almost-dead lighter.
Nikki smiled bigger. “Not hitting on you. Just seen you around lately and wondering…y’know, what’s your story?”
The woman lit another cigarette. “M’here for the cigarette gremlin.”
Nikki leaned forward. “Sorry, the…?”
“Cigarette. Gremlin.” The woman’s diction was meticulous through bruise-yellow teeth.
Oh, Nikki thought, this is going to be one of those Wart’s patio conversations.
They sat in silence for half a cigarette. “Was in Boulder for a week, thought maybe I’d find it again at The Pier,” she rasped. “Money’s almost out, maybe another couple weeks before I head back to Cali to find work. Then got a text about the gremlin from a buddy of mine, plays bass with Rebar McIntyre.”
“The gremlin plays bass?”
Her glare cut like broken glass. She put her half-smoked cigarette down on the ashtray and lit another. “Thought I saw it here Monday after karaoke, but y’all closed up before I could get a better look. Figured it must’ve been my imagination. I was about to head to Austin, but I spotted it for sure last night.”
“Hey, that’s…good?”
“Yeah.”
Lacking a beer, Nikki hit her THC vape instead. “Call me ignorant,” she said through a blueberry cloud, “but what’s a cigarette gremlin?”
Nikki didn’t expect a coherent answer, but the woman’s voice was calm, certain. “Skinny fucker, long limbs, folds up small as a dollar bill. Color of beer-soaked concrete, smells like ozone. Real gentle, skittish. Might look like a person out of the corner of your eye when it comes out to feed.”
“Feed?”
“On cigarettes. Grabs ‘em when you’re not looking, bums one if you’re alone and really fucked up. You’ve prob’ly had people complain about their smokes getting stolen recently.”
Nikki tried to remember any such complaints. “Oh, yeah, definitely. Guess that explains it.”
“Don’t fuckin’ patronize me,” the woman said, real calm.
Nikki’s cheeks heated under the disco lights. “Sorry. I’m just—” The woman’s eyes were dark and so, so sad. “I wanna hear more, if you wanna tell me.”
She waited patiently through another cigarette and a half.
“First time was outside No-No, back when I used to sneak into the clubs in Chicago,” the woman muttered. “Since then I seen ‘em around a hundred bars. Seen fewer and fewer the last few years.”
“What are they, though? Where do they come from?”
She shrugged with her face. “Guy in a rail yard told me a fairy tale once. Said cigarette gremlins are the souls of old hobos who stole from other hobos. A bum at some dive in Akron told me they were created by the UN, made to poison farmers’ fields and bring down the population, all that shit.”
She kept talking, and Nikki listened. At some point it got quiet, and DJ Rat-Brain sat at their table with a tired smile. The woman clammed up, so Nikki glared until Rat-Brain left. Checking the time, she gestured to J-Mack that she’d lock up. They were alone on the patio now, silent but for traffic, dark under the heat lamps.
“Why are there less of them now, though?” Nikki asked. “What happened to them?”
“Same thing that happens to all of us, I guess.”
Nikki leaned close into the ashtray stink. “Why are you looking for this one? What do you want with it?”
The woman sighed. “Man, I dunno. Feels like I don’t have a lot left in me, and I’m pissing it away on this. Maybe I just hate to think that something so weird and gross and free is gone forever.” She leaned forward. “What about you? Why’d you sit here? Why listen to this crazy shit all night?” A light passed across her eyes. “Shh.”
A shadow clipped through the door that led to the alley. Nikki thought to call out “We’re closed,” but bit her lip. She couldn’t make sense of the lanky, impossible silhouette that unfolded spidery limbs and crept across the darkened stage toward their table. Its pointed, featureless face lifted gently, sniffing as it approached the pack of Marlboro Reds on the bench beside the woman.
Nikki watched the gremlin’s long fingers collect the cigarettes at their feet. It froze at each distant sound, stop-motion creeping under the scarred wooden table. A breeze tickled Nikki’s shin with the chilly affection of a cat’s tail.
A dry sound, an earthy smell, and the presence at her feet was gone. Nikki blinked at the familiar patio, trying to force herself awake or back into the dream.
“That’s what I wanted,” the woman whispered. Nikki flinched as the woman’s bony hand touched hers.
Nikki swallowed something ashy, sour, and beautiful. “Guess I wanted the same thing.”