Chapter 1 — Menthol Baby (part1)
Copyright © 2025 Tony Marko All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Content Warning: Mature Themes and Psychological Content
This is a work of literary fiction. All characters, settings, and events are entirely fictional.
The narrative explores emotionally complex and psychologically intense themes, including grief, identity, trauma, and moral ambiguity, set against the backdrop of a decaying urban landscape.
The story includes scenes depicting emotional and physical hardship, as well as non-sexual violence and its psychological aftermath. These elements are integral to the development of characters and the exploration of human resilience.
Certain scenes may include depictions of emotional manipulation, systemic injustice, or existential distress. All such content is presented with narrative purpose and psychological realism, not for shock or sensationalism.
There are a few scenes involving consensual intimate encounters between adult characters, written in a restrained, non-explicit, and literary manner. These moments are integral to character development and emotional context, and are not presented in a graphic or pornographic way.
The text may also include strong language and references to difficult life experiences.
This book is intended for a mature audience. It does not promote or condone illegal, unethical, or harmful behavior.
Part I — The Taste of Menthol and Gunpowder
“I followed the scent of menthol — thought I’d find something clean. But all I found was the smoke of gunpowder. Tenderness was the first to go. Then came fear.”
Chapter 1 — Menthol Baby
The fog lay over the city, an old blanket — damp, heavy, soaked through with years of unspoken secrets. It slid from rooftops, licked at windows, pressed itself into the pores of buildings hunched as beggars, chained to narrow cobblestone streets. This city didn’t breathe — it smoked, steaming out its weariness from its wet guts.
The buildings leaned into one another, trying to hold their ground. Old two- and three-story blocks, carved from brick, covered in soot and moss, packed tight — close enough to whisper secrets through the cracks between balconies and gutters. The windows were mostly grimy, some boarded with plywood or newspapers. Behind them, shadows looked out — not people.
The whole city was a maze without an exit. Narrow alleys stinking of damp, dog, and yesterday’s sins. Streetlights barely glowed, ashamed to shine on this place. Their light didn’t cut through the fog — it melted into it, thickening the dark. There was no room here for the future. Only memories, rubbed thin, photographs in a homeless man’s pocket. The city lived from one shot of whiskey to the next — and even the whiskey tasted of smoke above the rooftops.
People didn’t walk here — they slid, bent into crooked hooks burdened with secrets heavier than their own bones. In the fog they became part of the landscape — hunched figures, blacker than the night, shadows etched onto old film. Faces stayed hidden — only eyes slipped out from under hoods or worn felt hats, sharp as knives searching for something soft. No one asked where you came from. Everyone already knew: you came from where nothing was left. Each carried a private hell — not loud, not heroic, but daily, a cough in the lungs, fingers shaking over a match. They lived side by side, never together. Even those who screwed did it with the same expression they smoked with — the look of someone attending the funeral of their last hope.
In the corners of bars, where the light hit with the force of a cop’s flashlight, sat the ones who betrayed to survive and the ones betrayed so someone else could. They didn’t meet each other’s eyes. Every glance carried too much recognition. No saints lived here. Sins weren’t confessed — they were acknowledged in silence, as ordinary as morning fog or evening loneliness. Among them drifted a child with an old man’s face. An old man with a child’s eyes. A woman whispering prayers with no names. And a man who washed his hands every night, stained only with memory. All of them shadows in the streets, hoping the fog would wash away what even the rain dared not touch.
The rain smeared the night across shingles, someone’s old guilt stretched thin. The house on the corner of Baudelaire and Stravinsky hadn’t hidden its weariness in years — plaster hung in strips like shed skin, balconies held together by rust and prayer. That house was a broken word no one dared correct.
Danny had just turned eighteen. No cake, no congratulations — only the damp ceiling above his bed and the hollow thought that, legally, he was now an adult. He didn’t feel like one.
Danny was born there, under the roof, in a space once an attic but turned into his home. Slanted ceiling, cracked floorboards, the smell of soot and old wood — that was his world. The window opening onto the fire escape admitted only two colors: gray and darker gray. Beside the bed stood a box of things no one had ever given him: a broken whistle, a shard of mirror, a piece of newspaper where the blurred outline of a tiger once was printed.
The real apartment was one floor down — where his father, mother, and sister Sofia lived. But Danny was separate. Not a stranger — just apart, a cat born outdoors that could never live inside. Just another street rat drifting through cold, black alleys. Sharp cheekbones, greasy dark hair, pale face, wiry body. Average height, but stronger than he looked — the only gift nature gave him, muscles hardened through daily effort.
His father worked at a postal warehouse, but the paycheck didn’t even cover a pair of boots. Every evening, he was seen at the Market, poking around among the night drifters, looking for discarded newspapers. He didn’t buy them — he waited for people to fall asleep or walk away, then took their pages. In the morning he read them aloud, like saying it out loud made him believe the world still made sense. He liked political stories — words about a future he’d never see.
His mother — a shadow always late coming home. She disappeared inside the house, moved quietly, a memory more than a presence. Her hands were forever washing, wiping, sewing, yet her eyes passed straight through people. She only spoke to Sofia, and even then in whispers — a prayer too quiet for God to hear.
Sofia was glass: clear, delicate, and dangerous. Break her, and you bled. She was the only one who sometimes climbed up to the attic to see Danny. She’d sit on the floor without a word, their backs pressed together. They didn’t talk — only listened to the rain sliding down the gutter, a long, sad letter from someone who had stopped writing.
There were no TVs then. The world existed only through words — the ones printed in newspapers, and the ones never spoken aloud. Danny read the clippings his father brought as though they were incantations. He kept the best phrases under his mattress, believing they might someday open a door — one that didn’t exist here.
A damp stain spread across the ceiling above his bed. At night it turned into a face, blurred and watchful. Danny wasn’t afraid. He stared back. When you live too long in an attic — in every sense — even shadows feel closer than the people downstairs.
And the rain kept falling, never learning how to stop. It didn’t just fall. It cut. It whispered along the roof, an inner voice that couldn’t be silenced. The attic was a trap of sound — here, rain wasn’t just weather. It was memory. Each drop striking the tin pipe sounded like a reminder: you are alone. And loneliness was never quiet.
Danny lay on the mattress and listened — above him, the sky; between them, a few inches of rotting wood. He didn’t trust the thoughts that came with the rain. They were too smooth, too convincing. They called to him, softly, the way a mother might if she hadn’t held you in years.
To keep those thoughts from spreading like mold across the walls, he stood. The floor was damp. He laid out a rag and began his exercises — mechanical, almost ritual. One. Two. Three. Up. Down. Again. Again. Again.
His muscles burned — the only thing that truly belonged to him. Pain didn’t lie. The sensation of the body drowned out the voices in his head. A little more, and he would be nothing but flesh again: pure effort, no thought.
His father once said, “Smart people always suffer more. Better to be tired.” Back then Danny thought that was weakness. Now — he wasn’t so sure.
He did pushups until his palms burned red, until his breath pressed tight against his chest, a steel vice closing in. And when he collapsed again on the damp mattress, his heart pounded so hard it felt ready to break through his ribs.
And the rain kept falling. It no longer sounded like a threat. It sounded like a pulse.
In the murky alleys where streetlamps barely pierced the veil of smog and hopelessness, Danny grew up. The slums — living corpses — pressed in from all sides with their peeling walls and air thick with rot and despair. It was a world where hope died daily, and dreams crumbled into dust that settled on the cold concrete beneath your feet.
His parents had long since lost themselves, prisoners of their own demons. His father, with a hollow face and eyes lit only by fatigue and hatred, came home every evening from the postal warehouse where he left the last of his strength. There was no room in him for joy. His hands, rough and scarred, knew only one thing — how to strike. In his gaze, Danny saw the mirror of his own fears. Each time his father raised a hand, the world shrank to a tiny, black dot. That dot was where his silent hell began.
Danny’s mother worked in a laundry, her hands worn raw in hot water and chemicals that ate through skin the way life eats through the soul. There, among steam, filth, and other people’s shirts, she learned to disappear — a shadow slipping between bedsheets, leaving only the faint smell of detergent and loss.
She didn’t steal, not exactly. She “picked up what was left.” In the pockets of strangers’ jackets and jeans she found cigarette butts — half-smoked, still warm. She kept them in a detergent box like relics. Sometimes there were pills, spilled coke, powder stuck in a lining. She knew how to scrape it out, dissolve it in water, dry it, make it smoke or swallow.
“Sin?” she’d say, taking a drag from a skinny hand-rolled cig made from someone else’s butt. “Sin is being honest in this city.”
At night, she came home drained, her fingers burnt-out matches. Her hair always smelled of soap; her eyes — of nothing. She barely spoke. Just sat silently at the table, pulling from her pockets the day’s catch: crumpled bills, a piece of chocolate forgotten in a jacket, or something thinner — traces of life others overlooked, but she turned into survival.
She wasn’t a mother in any classical sense. She was part of the apartment, part of the dead scenery that framed Danny’s childhood. A woman with darkened nails, always a little drunk on poverty, a little dried out by sorrow.
Danny’s mother didn’t love him. Not because she couldn’t — just because there was no space left in her for love. She carried him for nine months like a burden nobody asked for and gave birth between shifts without shedding a tear. To her, Danny was just another sick memory, the result of someone else’s body, someone else’s hands, someone else’s night. She fed him when she had to, screamed when she wanted silence, and stayed silent when he asked for just a glance. In her eyes, he wasn’t a son — just a shadow of exhaustion that couldn’t be washed away.
His sister spoke to him rarely — in fragments, like coins tossed into a fountain without wishes. Sometimes she joked, sometimes she shared something that bothered her. But there was always a wall between them — not made of hate, but indifference that had long since become normal. Her voice felt warm to him only because all the others were cold. And when she laughed, he caught those crumbs like they were the last proof he was still here. Still waiting to be seen.
At night, he roamed the streets, where every step thudded like a dull heartbeat. In dark corners where rotting boards creaked underfoot and the air reeked of decay, Danny felt alive. He was drawn to the filth and the dark, because he’d been born in it — because he knew every sound, every crack, every shadow
And even in that dead-end, he dreamed. Somewhere deep inside, a flame still flickered. He dreamed of breaking out — not just escaping, but becoming someone new. Someone they’d write about. Not for fame. Just to leave a mark. To say he’d been here. That he survived. That every scar on him was truth worth hearing.
Danny lived on the edge — between light and dark, between hate and hope. Every day was a fight, and every night — a test. But he knew: even in the deepest dark, you can find a spark. And if you guard it — it can turn into fire.
