Crumbs Whenever she ate she talked about food, all the magnificent repasts of her past, with her mouth full. And he’d sit across from her and watch the food on her plate grow smaller and more insignificant with each description of some towering feast or exquisite confection of her youth. She’d close her eyes to remember, shaking her head as if to say, “No, you can’t really see it from here.” Then she’d open her eyes and he’d feed on …
Tag: Stench
“Dog Shit” * Nonfiction * Ro Miller
I stepped in dog shit right before getting on a Brooklyn-bound Q train and spent the remaining twenty-six minutes considering scent as a social factor. The first thing about dog shit is the feel of the sole of your shoe sliding beneath you. The squish is muted, but immediately there is an odor. Not one that you can smell but rather one that exists as quiet disgust in the back of your throat. A quick glance backward pushes the nausea …
“The Flavors of Red” & Other Poems * Sharon Whitehill
The Flavors of Red 1 It arrives with the salt taste of blood, the hot-pepper burn on the tongue, strikes the ear with the force of a shouted command or the pitch of a scream, and remains like the lingering mark of a slap, the invisible glow of an unwanted touch. 2 Drink your wine in a room …
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“Hotdogs” and Other Poems by Anthony DeGregorio
Hotdogs I smell steamed hotdogs on Hospital Avenue in Danbury Where I’ve never in 10 years seen a truck or wagon Selling the classic Americanized delicacy Within miles of the Avenue’s Hospital where I’m headed On my way to Cardiac Rehab, And I suddenly wonder if this is how time ends? The End Times merely a thick pungency, with the Condensation of existence into a smothering of mustard, Sauerkraut, and onions, the source of the apocalyptic vapor Invisible apparently to …
“The Master of Scents” * Fiction * By Vincent Ravalec * Translated by Wendeline A. Hardenberg
He liked to think that wherever he happened to go, he got into people’s heads. He wormed his way inside them, influenced them, guided the moments he joined—that’s how he understood his purpose, his role here and there: as a joint venture—as surely as a ray of sunlight illuminates a day or the rain dampens your hair. Few knew him directly or had access to him, and yet many had encountered him. He was the Master of Scents. He ruled …
Anosmia: My Newly Discovered Disability * Nonfiction * Ernest Gilman
“ Par ma foi !” cries Molière’s would-be bourgeois gentleman M. Jourdain: “For more than forty years I have been speaking prose while knowing nothing of it”! I had my own Molière moment just recently when I learned that there was actually a name—and a scientific name at that—for my inability to smell: “anosmia.” I myself might otherwise have come up with a name like “olfactory deprivation,” or perhaps “smell blindness” (I know this is controversial), but I wanted to imply a …
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“The Sirens’ Call” * Short Story * Michael Emeka
Thunder muttered in the sky and the rain threatening all evening came in a soft drizzle. The enormous rats scuttling around in the pile of rubbish across the road darted into their holes. A stench of putrefaction rose from the refuse dump as the rain beat on it. Pushing open the front door of the building, I raced inside, pursued by the rain and the smell. My footfalls echoed on the bare concrete steps as I went upstairs. Somewhere in …
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Moby-Dick: An Ambergris Digression * Herman Melville * Excerpt
Although it is today considered one of the “great books,” Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale was not a success during his lifetime. On the contrary, it was a disappointment to his readers that fancied his earlier light-hearted (and largely fictional) travel adventure books set in the South Pacific. During the writing of Moby-Dick (1850-51), Melville met Nathaniel Hawthorne and took time away from his novel in progress to review the short-story collection Mosses From an Old Manse, which just …
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“AN OLFACTORY LIFE,” Fiction by Steve Carr
My nose has been trained to sniff out every objectionable smell within sniffing range. It’s a marvel of radar technology. Why the military hasn’t used my nose for national defense, or offense, I have no idea. Being in the hospital, in this bed, my nose has been working overtime. Cleaning fluids. Pure alcohol. The perfumes the nurses wear. My urine soaking through the top sheet. My nose is unable to block out the smell of any of it. My nose …
“Stench No. 7” by Jim Knipfel
*Aromatica Poetica is honored to present Jim Knipfel’s true story of chasing smell as the first in our Blind Writers Project series, made possible by a generous grant from Awesome Foundation Disability* It was around quarter to seven on a bright and warm July morning in 1996. I’d just dragged myself out of the 23rd Street subway station in Manhattan on my way to work, and was waiting to cross Broadway. Thanks to the Associated Blind apartment building down the …