Cigarette Butt

One day, not long ago, a cigarette butt was looking up at the wide blue sky. For some reason, cigarette butt had very good eyesight. It watched the clouds going on their way east, and it thought about life.

Being smoked, cigarette but had every reason to feel morose, but for some reason it didn't feel depressed. It thought back idly to the proud day it was a whole cigarette, with all its friends in the cigarette pack. They were fresh and new, packed in by a machine that made hundreds and thousands of them, all day long. It was so exciting at the factory. Many of cigarette butt's associates thought that they were like soldiers, bound for exotic places far away, over the globe. But cigarette butt's pack ended up at a White Hen liquor store in a suburb of Chicago.

"How I would have liked to have seen the world!" thought cigarette butt, when a cloud wandered by that looked like the Eiffel Tower.

A robin landed near cigarette butt. "Hello, what are you?" asked the bird.

"I was a Camel Light filtered cigarette." said cigarette butt, mater-of-factly.

"Are you good to eat?" asked the robin, looking at cigarette butt with one bird eye closely.

"Not really. All that is left of me is the filter." admitted cigarette butt.

The bird pecked at cigarette butt to make sure this was true.

"Ouch!" said the cigarette butt.

"Okay, well, take care of yourself!" said the robin, and it flew off into the next yard.

After the robin was gone, it was quite for a long time. Cigarette butt was comfortable, because after the robin had pecked, cigarette butt had become wedged & almost completely hidden in a deep crack between two paving stones. Down there was a complicated fascinating fluff from tree leaves, twigs, bits of bark, and below this mixing in was loamy earth flecked with bits of decayed granite.

Cigarette butt became drowsy down there in that secret place, and it decided for all time that life was good. The earth was interesting, and cigarette butt knew it was now becoming a part of it.