Death of a Cigarette: A Story of Survival, Memory and Legacy. by Timothy Webber
Death of a Cigarette opens in the present day, at a Midwestern museum where an artifact rests behind glass: a single unlit Lucky Strike cigarette. From there, Chance, the cigarette himself, begins to speak.
He takes us back to the tobacco fields, tended by sisters Eva Mae and Ella Mae, where the journey truly begins. From curing barns to the factory floor, Chance and his siblings are shaped, wrapped by Henri the dignified French paper, and packed for war. By Chapter 4, their voices awaken fully.
The pack crosses the Atlantic into the hands of Philip Martin, a Missouri farm boy preparing for D-Day. On the Channel, tracer arcs stitch the sky. At Omaha Beach, the ramp drops, Sally burns bright, Winston steadies Philip with an unlit benediction, and Chance, riding in Philip’s chest pocket, becomes a quiet talisman of survival.
Inches and breaths define the beach crossing. Afterward, the war opens into hedgerows and aftermath: a harmonica at dusk, a shared apple, unsent letters. When the fighting ends, silence follows Philip home to Missouri, lingering in a drawer only carefully opened.
In 1961, during the Stars and Stripes centennial in Bloomfield, he gives his uniform, and Chance, to the museum, where a modest placard tells almost nothing of their story.
Decades later, in the Epilogue, Philip’s grandson Art encounters the display once more in the present day. Recognition bridges private grief and public memory, completing the circle that began in the Prologue. Chance remains unlit, but not unspent.
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Author Bio:
Timothy C. Webber is a writer, Navy veteran, and lifelong tinkerer based in Dallas, Texas. Originally from Savannah, Georgia, he spent 11 years in the U.S. Navy, serving as an electronics technician before turning his attention to storytelling. His fiction explores how memory lives on, in objects, in silence, and in the things we leave behind.
His debut novella, Death of a Cigarette, follows a single unlit cigarette carried through World War II, blending historical realism with quiet lyricism.
Off the page, Tim restores old cuckoo clocks, carves wood by hand, and believes some things are worth fixing, especially stories.