by Bonnie ZoBell

Charlotte’s sinuses were so awry they made the inside of her head feel like a perfect storm. Her nose streamed fluids she had to tend for days. Then, in her shrink’s waiting room that week, she’d met the first guy in six months she could stand to be in the same room with for more than five minutes, Bobby, and he was supposed to call. 

“Aub sick,” she had to say when he did.

He said he’d call again, but she guessed it was over. 

Her power of reason, viscous though it was, suggested she go to work anyway and not get behind. Her id suggested she stay home and rest as a good fuck could still be in her future if this Bobby called again. Her therapist asserted, regularly, that she not view men this way. 

Charlotte continued traipsing up the stairs of the Staten Island Ferry on her way to and from work, her hand firmly pressing against the turnstiles, inviting germs from their limited little lives on metal handles to burrow into her skin, invading her. Soon enough, her bouquet of viral strands became so heady she couldn’t leave her bed. Nothing smelled like anything anymore, except maybe Kleenex, which didn’t smell at all. Finally she was convinced, by her sister and then her doctor, to go to Urgent Care, where she saw one Dr. Almond. Charlotte’s sinuses had begun to drain by then, but she remained exhausted and could not remember much or think. She couldn’t smell coffee, not grapefruit, nor insecticide, not the rotten Chinese food she’d ordered out last week and forgotten all about. 

“It happens,” Dr. Almond said.

Charlotte decided not to comment on his typical male obviousness.

The clinic tested this and that, but her olfactory sense never returned. She could no longer smell when it was going to rain, when her dog didn’t feel well, when she was going to get her period. She’d no longer know the peak of summer because the aroma of fresh pizza and sewer grates couldn’t penetrate her cerebrum.

Then the guy called again. Bobby.

“I don’t smell anymore,” she told him.

After a pause, he asked, “Isn’t that a good thing?” 

She met him at a gallery opening in Soho. With a flourish, he presented a floral arrangement from behind his back. “I brought you these.”

She couldn’t smell the muskiness of attraction or whether he’d bothered with cologne, but when she dipped her nose inside the peonies, she breathed, and remembered, or thought she did, the scent. She hooked her arm through his as they proceeded to the show. 

 “They’re lovely,” she told him.