The Way She Held the Cigarette

A week later she came to my door, and kept coming back and now she had been to my flat many times on her way home from school in the centre of Oslo and had drunk tea in my red kitchen, where I told her of things I knew something about, my books, Afghanistan; the crossroads of cultures, about Mao at his desk, about Edvard Munch and the Party, and she told me about her family, and why she hated going home from school. Once she came up from the city and did her homework at my kitchen table, and I sat down to help her and later we talked and smoked till late in the evening, and I think it was the way she held the cigarette between her fingers which touched me the most, how her palm unfolded in front of her chest with a slight bend of the wrist and the glowing tip pointing to the floor, and that night was the first night she did not go home.

--Per Petterson, I Curse the River of Time (2010)