Tether

I walk the swallowed beach, where the sea keeps taking back what we once called land. Years ago, I sat here with my mother. The inescapable scent of her made me sick.

The wind from the ocean swept the yeast from her skin. And I was grateful for it. If I am the nose, my mother is the hand.

I make things from scent, and she shapes clay. She always said sculpting was like midwifing. You don’t make the form, you help it be born.

The lab smells like nothing. Even nothing has a scent. The nothing makes my skin itch, like waiting for a call.

In the silence of the lab, the scents are loud. They mix, change, pervert one another—until they become something new. There’s instinct at play too—something that leads to creation.

Maybe it’s unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Maybe it’s a little something that’s all mine. These small experiments—if exceptional—will one day live inside a bottle, purchased by a select few who value such luxuries, who can still afford them.