My family was poor, and every family in our building was as well. We had the worst apartment in our building; the one in the attic. It was sweltering in the summer and in winter we froze. The rent was ninety dollars a month. It wasn’t worth half of that.

I can’t imagine where our mother was that night. She was always there.
My brother and I sat across a huge table, a plywood plank on sawhorses actually, in the single room of our windowless watchtower domicile. The surrounding shelves were bare splintered wood held together with rusted roofing nails sparsely populated with cans of food we all hated and jars of things reserved for invited company that never came. The jars remained unopened though we had company that night.

The Cigar Man was a thin and wrinkled old bastard with a filthy charcoal gray suit that might have been made of real charcoal. His thinning gray hair frizzed outward from his spotted pate and the acrid yellow light from a single bare bulb in the doorway lit it into a perverted halo. One of his eyes was unusually small; the other was impossibly big, cataracted and lazy. There was a crusty orange residue in the corners of his mouth as if he had been eating the guts of pumpkins and had fallen asleep. His teeth were sharp brown triangles that he licked when he receded his thin lips.
Between his caked yellow claws was an oversized cigar, an exaggeration of itself like a cartoon prop. Thin wisps of malodorous smoke rose from it and collected at the crotched ceiling of the room. He sat at the end of the plank a few feet from where my brother and I ate stale graham crackers from paper plates.
We were just babies, really. I had just turned five, and my brother was still a couple months short of four candles on his cake.

We didn’t deserve it.

With reflexes impossible to detect, the Cigar Man was underneath my brother in his chair, and with a grin that extended past his ears he compacted the monstrous cigar into his poor little mouth. With a fistful of the toddler’s hair in one hand and a grip on the fat cigar in the other he exuded strange and horrible music from his pores. The sour and cacophonous notes bled into the surrounding air as the smoke poured from my brother’s nose, ears and the corners of his eyes. His muffled screams have never stopped.