Thousand: Seven Hundred Sixty-Eight

end of her cigarette. There are a few shreds of tobacco in the cigarette. But mostly it's other stuff that improve one on another or join together in ways that make life at the end of the world an unending riot of simple pleasures and relatively painless small stresses. She's been getting the cigarettes from a friend who knows a friend who makes regular visits to an old crone in the woods. The woman scours the woods, the friend says, knows all sorts of lichens and fungi and flowers and knows them like nobody except her teachers who are all