ComEnts

She'd come home from a day's work so full of caffeine that she would not be able to sit down and relax straight away. At first this meant that she could get all the crappy little chores out the way, wash dishes, fold laundry - the little things that were needed to maintain order in her small one bedoomed flat.

But as the pressures of her job increased, she found that she needed to do more than unwind in the evenings, she needed to relax and enjoy herself. As she ran her fingers down its length, noting the ridges and imperfections underneath the soft stroking of her fingers, she smiled to herself. Some 6 inches long, expertly brought into being by her own fair hand and - by her own standards - quite a large one, she felt the tension lift out of her shoulders as she made herself comfortable on the sofa. She was always careful though; she had seen too many of her friends suffer and worry over "accidents" such as those that plagued anyone who indulged in the same elicit pleasures that she was about to enjoy.

She used to worry that her friends and acquaintances would find out about her habits, but now she merely wondered what they would say if they found out. Sometimes she felt that if she told them, it would help break her out of the boring, staid, rut of predictability that she felt she was in, but she knew that it would be a stupid idea - the risk to her professional prospects as much as the hassle of dealing with the persoanl fall-out meant that she would not be rushing to reveal any great secrets just yet. Besides, it wasn't as if she was the only person ever to seek refuge in "fringe activities". She knew for a fact that most of the people she knew had experimented. One friend of hers had all but gone off the rails in her teenage years, and although she had survived without any serious scars, she was still understandably "anti" to this day.

As she pulled the end into her mouth, she narrowed her eyes and sucked - gently at first, holding the lighter underneath the other end at just the right distance so that her inhalation caused the flame to flicker and flick away at the crocus-shaped bulge until it caught light and the paper twisted and contorted into ash.