Snuff – Danielle Chelosky

March 11, 2025

I woke at six a.m. the day after another shitty poetry reading. I was twenty and entangled with an NYU poetry student in his bed in Chinatown. He moved to New York from Texas the week before and the mattress was on the floor and his clothes strewn about in an avalanche beside it. The night before he told me about how he struck lucky with stocks and unexpectedly made tens of thousands of dollars, enough for him to leave his old life behind, his old life of working in emergency rooms at hospitals and becoming increasingly desensitized to the different ways a human body can be disturbed. I felt he was lying about the stocks, though I didn’t know why, and I didn’t say anything. As he explained it all he was rubbing nicotine into his gums. I was addicted to vaping and cigarettes but that—snuff, he said it was called—disgusted me.

He was asleep when I left the bed. The sun gleamed on every surface in the living room, as if it were the middle of the day. My phone buzzed with a call from my friend who lived in Brooklyn. I reluctantly picked up. He wasn’t making any sense and he was slurring all his words. When I asked if he was home, he murmured for long enough that I knew the answer was no. He kept talking and I didn’t know what to say because I didn’t know what he was saying but I just knew he wasn’t safe and I knew he was addicted to meth and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do so I just kept telling him to go home and then I hung up.

I drank a full glass of tap water before returning to the bedroom to get my stuff. I tiptoed around the crumpled T-shirts and pairs of pants, trying to identify what was mine amongst his mess. I noticed the can of snuff sitting on his desk next to the keyboard of his Mac. I grabbed it as naturally as if it were mine, not really knowing why, maybe wanting him to stop for his own good, maybe wanting it for myself to see what it felt like. I looked at him one last time when I was done gathering my things. He was either still asleep or pretending to be. I snuck out into the winter morning, down the stairs and out the door, immediately smoking a cigarette.

The night before he had been telling me about his stalker. His stalker was this Twitter poet who won a bunch of awards and prizes. The stalker had written poems about him and thanked him in the acknowledgments and dedicated the book to him even though they’d only talked a couple of times. The stalker kept showing up to his apartment without warning and trying to buzz in. The stalker had food and packages delivered to his apartment, saying they were gifts. When I asked if he’d tried telling the stalker to stop, he just kind of shrugged.

I considered this as I smoked my cigarette and walked past honking cars, my skirt lifting in the wind, my hands lazily attempting to keep it down. I accidentally made eye contact with a truck driver as he gave me a devilish grin and honked his horn twice. But maybe it wasn’t an accident. Maybe I wanted to hold his gaze, see if it was enough to make him crash. It wasn’t. Maybe I wasn’t so beautiful after all. My hair was in knots. I desperately needed a shower. I didn’t shower on my own until I was eleven years old. I would ask my mom to help me. She would stand by the sliding glass doors and rub the shampoo and conditioner into my hair, spread the soap all over my body. Sometimes she would refuse and so I’d go days without showering until she gave in.

The night before the NYU poet and I were walking back to his place after the reading when a storm broke out. Torrential downpour. We fled to an overhang and it was just us watching the city transform into this mystical state of madness. Thunder, lightning, high winds all at arm’s length. In the middle of it all we kissed and I forgot that we weren’t really that compatible, our lips together in this intense moment sealed a hope within me that there was love between us. I knew I was wrong, especially because he was fucking another girl, sometimes the same day that he fucked me, but I didn’t think about that as the sky lit up with mesmeric danger.

In the morning, as I walked, it was like the storm hadn’t happened at all. There were no signs of the disaster. I wondered if the NYU poet was a liar. If he was lying about the stocks, if he was lying about the stalker. My first memory of being lied to was when my older cousins told me they met Taylor Swift. We were at a Christmas party and they were giggling and drunk even though they were only fourteen. I believed them and I was so angry they met Taylor Swift and I didn’t. Later I told my mom about it and she said that never happened, that they were just making jokes, having fun, and I didn’t understand why someone would do that, just make up something from thin air, I hadn’t even realized that was possible.

I was thinking about how I hadn’t really changed, no, I was still a naïve little idiot, the kind of girl who kisses a boy in a storm thinking it’s magical and not a pathetic scene of forced romance where there is only desperate lust, I was thinking about that when I tripped and fell, fell right on my face, my nose against concrete, blood everywhere, my skirt up, my underwear still on the NYU poet’s floor because I wanted an excuse to return, and so I was exposed on the ground and bleeding and everyone in New York City came up to my humiliated body and laughed loudly and took photos and I remained there until they got bored of it and went home.