By Maria Hahn · July 2025
Maria had just turned fourteen when Mother burst into her room, voice bright and breathless, like a teenager telling a secret.
“Guess what?! Jack let me smoke pot!”
Maria blinked up from her bed, where she’d been half-listening to music - probably Queen, maybe Vivaldi, possibly Middle of Nowhere by Hanson - while doodling or writing or flipping through a book. It all blurred together these days. She lived in her head more than anywhere else. Outside, a door slammed, and then the faint squawk of someone yelling at their kid in the E-building. Every room in every unit looked the same - white walls, brownish carpet, old iron railings that peeled and smelled like blood if you picked at it long enough.
She stared at Mother, who stood grinning in the doorway as if the world hadn’t just tilted. Maria’s brain tried to catch up. Jack. Pot. Mother. Smoking it.
“I want to smoke pot,” she said, like it had just occurred to her, even though she’d known - knew deep in her bones long before she even knew what weed was - that it was meant for her. She didn’t fully understand why. She just did.
Mother paused. Maria could see the thoughts moving behind her eyes, the old gears grinding against the new. Just a few months ago, Mother wouldn’t let them drink iced tea - wouldn’t touch it herself, not with the Word of Wisdom etched into her spine.
Then Mother nodded, casual as if they were discussing buying socks. “Okay. I’ll ask Jack if you can smoke pot and I’ll get back to you.”
The days after that were a haze. Not the good kind, not yet. Just ordinary sunlit days crawling past while she waited for the thing to happen.
And then it did.
Jack lived one building over, in D-2 - one of the rare one-bedrooms, wedged next to the Mormon missionaries in D-4 like a cosmic joke.
Jack had rolled it fresh. That was part of the deal - five dollars, paid by Maria, arranged by Mother. They stood crammed together in the tiny bathroom of Jack’s apartment. It was like a sacrament meeting in hell: linoleum floor, flickering light, the body of Christ replaced by a freshly rolled joint. The owners had ordered all the units furnished the same way - same cabinets, same medicine cabinet mirror with the rust forming in one corner. Maria could have been in anyone's bathroom. The sameness made it feel wrong - like sin in a church.
Jack held the lighter, of course. He took a puff first. Then he handed it to Maria.
She fumbled it, nervous. No idea what she was doing. Her parents didn’t smoke. She’d never seen it done up close, not really. She raised the joint to her lips and tried. Inhaled - poorly. Coughed. Tried again.
Two breaths. That’s all she got.
Then Mother, who hadn’t touched the joint, started swaying like she’d lost her balance on a boat. Her laugh rose like a siren in the small room. Loud, strange, shrill.
Maria stared at her. Jack flipped on the bathroom fan - the kind with the weak buzz and plastic vent cover, installed in every unit. Secondhand smoke? That fast? No way.
Mother couldn’t stand up. Her legs wobbled and she gripped Maria’s shoulder like a lifeline. Maria, heart pounding, slipped an arm around her waist and guided her out of the bathroom.
They moved in awkward steps - down the stairs on the northwest corner of the D-building, the concrete cold through the soles of Maria’s sandals. Then twenty-five feet down a sidewalk, around the corner to the left, and fifty feet down another sidewalk that led to the C-building. Their building. Their end units - C-6 and C-7 - waited like bunkers. The breezeways all smelled like wet concrete and cigarettes. The porch light in the stairwell flickered like it was trying to quit.
When they reached the little patch of grass outside, Maria was sweating. Mother slumped forward, breath heavy, hands brushing the marigolds she had planted herself earlier that spring.
Jack leaned over the balcony above them. “She forgot her shoes!” he called, then tossed her sandals down.
They hit the lawn with a soft slap, but Mother shrieked like someone had fired a gun. She ducked, covering her head, then dropped to her knees and started laughing again - poking her fingers into the flowers as though she’d just discovered them for the first time.
Maria stood still, watching her. Something was broken. She didn’t know what yet, but she could feel the crack growing, silent and deep.
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Look for the rest of this story, and more, in Maria's first short story collection coming soon.
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