The Scent Keeper

by Erica Bauermeister

Grief makes a tunnel of our lives, and it is all too easy to lose sight of the other people in the darkness with us—to wish they weren’t there, so their loss would stop rubbing up against ours.

When you change a scent, you change the memory, he’d always said.

Smells don’t care what the mind or heart wants, however. Scents will find their way around the darkness of closed eyes, slipping past barricades of thought. The body is their accomplice. We can live without food for weeks, and water for days, but try not to breathe and the lungs mutiny.

People are like that—given a chance, we come back, whether we want to or not.

Words were like scents that way; they changed the very air you breathed.

Over time, I’d learned that lies have a scent, too. They always smell a little too sweet, like they need an extra boost of olfactory persuasion.

I’d learned by this point not to talk to management—all the good stories came from the people with dirt on their hands.

I’d always thought winks were the strangest of the facial expressions I’d encountered after I left the island. One eye closed, as if in trust of shared understanding; the other open, watching.

The sky still held the light of late summer, and I could hear rustling from the boats around us, men’s voices, the sounds of cooking and settling in. In the houses that lined the channel, illuminated windows held small moments, like the open doors of an Advent calendar. A woman walking back and forth, a baby in her arms. A couple sitting at a table. A boy playing with a dog. All those stories, all those lives, each one an entire world to the person living it, and yet I knew none of them.