The Pregnant Woman Who Baptized Our Cigarette in a Toilet Full of Hell
We fucking knew. But we lit up anyway. Because when you’re young and dumb and chasing the kind of high that makes the world blur at the edges, morality becomes just another casualty.
Hawaiian Gardens—the kind of place where ambition goes to die and nobody’s looking for redemption. We were white boys with cash and no direction, three idiots chasing the next bad idea, convinced we were explorers charting new territory. Angel dust was the adventure of the night, something we’d only heard about in whispers, the kind of drug that promised to knock reality sideways.
Somebody gave us an address. Told us, “Just walk down the alley. Look for the house that smells like a body went bad in it.”
We found it.
Bars on the windows, foil taped over the glass to keep out the sun—or the CIA. A door that looked like it had been kicked in more times than it had ever been opened properly.
We knocked.
A pregnant woman answered, wearing nothing but a stretched-out tank top that had given up the fight. One of her nipples kept slipping out, waving at us like it had something to say.
She squinted, sizing us up. “What the fuck do you want?”
Her hair was greasy, her eyes sunken, her belly stretched tight like a drum. There was something tragically beautiful about her, like a faded movie star who had traded the red carpet for a dirty mattress.
“We wanna hit,” I said, like I was ordering a goddamn coffee.
Her whole demeanor shifted—from hostile to business casual.
“Come in,” she said.
The house smelled like neglect, the kind of filth that’s had time to settle, to soak into the walls. Dishes stacked in the sink, roaches claiming squatters’ rights in the corners. You could tell nobody cleaned because nobody cared.
She didn’t offer us a seat.
She didn’t have one to offer.
“Twenty bucks,” she said, hand out.
I gave it to her.
“You got your Coors Menthol?”
Lewis had the menthol cigarette tucked behind his ear like some kind of degenerate Boy Scout. He handed it over.
She took it and walked into the only bathroom in the house. The kind of bathroom that looked like it doubled as a crime scene. Above the toilet, there were makeshift shelves, little plastic baggies, bits of foil, a graveyard of addiction.
Then she lifted the toilet lid.
That’s when I saw it.
The water inside wasn’t water.
It was a bubbling, corroded cauldron of chemical warfare. The porcelain had been eaten away, leaving a thick crust around the rim, a deep-fried halo of filth. This was their mixing pot, their brewing station. She explained that if the cops ever raided, all they had to do was flush, and every trace of their operation would disappear.
She dipped the cigarette into the toxic sludge—held it there, counting.
One… Two… Three…
Her nipple was out again, but at this point, the whole scene was so grotesque, it didn’t matter. She pulled the cigarette out, dripping in whatever the fuck that was, and wrapped it back in foil before handing it to me.
Like she was giving me communion.
We Were in It Now
She saw our hesitation and smirked.
“Wanna hit?”
Now, in this situation, you always say yes.
You say no, you’re a cop. You hesitate, you’re getting a gun to your head.
So we said yes.
She already had her own cigarette—one that had been marinating in toilet juice long before we got there. She lit up, put it to her lips, inhaled deep.
The cherry on the cigarette crackled like it was burning through time itself.
She held the smoke in her lungs like she was absorbing the secrets of the universe. Then, she exhaled.
No coughing. No reaction. Just a blank stare, like she had been unzipped from reality.
She passed it to me.
And because I was a fucking idiot, I took a drag, just like she did.
Held it in. Felt my brain shift gears into something primal and unfamiliar.
Then I passed it to Lewis.
Then Mike.
Then, back to her.
She took another hit, sank down onto a pile of clothes on the couch, her legs splayed open, her eyes rolling back.
One of her nipples was out again, but now it didn’t matter.
She just sat there, melting into the filth, cigarette still loosely hanging between her fingers, like a ghost in her own house.
And that’s when it hit me.
She was pregnant.
And we were getting high with her.
And we were watching her do it.
And none of us did a goddamn thing.
We walked out of that house like it was nothing. Back into the night, back to whatever version of normal we still believed in. We didn’t talk about it. Not really. We just let it settle into the back of our minds, let it become another shadow that followed us around.
Because what the fuck were we supposed to say?
That we’d just watched a pregnant woman inhale death like it was oxygen? That we’d participated? That we’d stood there, breathing it in, pretending like this was just another night?
I think about her sometimes. Not just her, but the kid. The one marinating in that chemical haze before it ever took its first breath. Did it even make it out alive? Or was it born into a world that had already chewed it up before it even had a chance to cry?
Maybe that’s why I don’t believe in innocence. Not really. Not after that. You don’t get to pretend you didn’t know. You don’t get to erase the memories that don’t fit the story you want to tell about yourself.
We fucking knew.
And we walked away anyway.
