Wax Wings

一

18 year old [surname] [name] would have hated the person you were now, nearly a decade and a half into the future.

The thought occurred to you randomly, as the wind picked up and chilled your exposed cheeks until they and the tip of your nose tinged a rosy pink. You removed the cigarette from between your lips, exhaling a cloud of smoke into the cold night air and tapped off the excess ash into the ashtray you kept on your balcony.

Through the smoke, the usually clear nighttime sky looked cloudy. You admired the bright moon as it shone through the murky air and illuminated the concrete balcony you sat on and pondered the rather dismal thought that had popped into your mind.

Yes, without a doubt, she would have hated you. You, in all your bad habits and gloomy glory, would have been despised by the ever-righteous 18 year old that you had been. Wasn't that a comforting thought?

Though, perhaps she wasn't far from the mark. You hated yourself now too.

Wanting to dismiss the notion, you took another deep inhale on the half-gone cigarette. The self-hatred swelled in your chest instead of dissolving and, frustrated with the way your train of thought had been chugging along, you snuffed out the dull red glow.

You wished you could quench the depressing thought like you could the cherry.

Picking up the ash tray, you stood from your plastic lawn chair and opened the sliding glass door to your dingy apartment. It was cheap, allowed pets and smoking (outside), and it housed you and your dog so it was all you needed. Even if it was a tad ugly and more than a tad shitty, it was still your home, as you so generously called it since you moved here six years ago.

Atlas, your ever-loyal but steadily aging Rottweiler, came trotting over as you stepped inside. His mouth lolled open and his tongue flopped out as he gazed up at you lovingly. Even if you hated yourself, at least Atlas loved you.

He had been a rescue from a puppy mill years ago, back before you retired. You generally didn't take jobs like that, but they needed a hero there to apprehend the rather difficult owners and you had been the only one available in the area. Perhaps it was fate, since that was the day you met Atlas.

Though he was a trembling little puppy, Atlas was standing in front of an even smaller one, probably the runt of their litter. Atlas was obviously the biggest of his litter, judging by the size of the puppies confined to the same cage as him. He snarled and yipped at anyone who tried to touch him or the runt he was guarding. You managed to coax him out with a granola bar that you had in your costume and he stuck to your side since.

The runt Atlas had been guarding never made it out of the hospital though. The vets said there was likely a lot of interbreeding from the puppy mill and almost all of the puppies had some sort of internal complications. Those and the severe malnutrition that the small pup suffered shortened the runt's lifespan to only three months old at the most.

Atlas was fiercely protective of you from the moment after he barreled into your arms to accept the granola you offered him and his sibling. You trained him briefly to become part of your hero team (Atlas was such a fitting name for a hero, you thought, and it fit well with your own) but there wasn't enough time for him to finish it before you retired.

And good timing too, since not long after you found out that he had some severe issues with his lungs similar to his littermates. He was fine for the most part, though you had to start taking special care that he didn't overexert himself and maintained a healthy exercise schedule. The news had nearly convinced you to quit smoking yourself, knowing it couldn't be good for Atlas (or you, but that wasn't as much of a concern as Atlas' health was), but the efforts proved useless when the addiction was harder to break than you thought. Instead, you worked around his limitations by smoking only outdoors and when Atlas wasn't with you.