Matthew Richmond was a northern boy so the August air in Louisiana was like having a huge hot soaking towel slapped across his entire body when the airport doors whooshed open and puked him onto the sidewalk for in search of a taxi. A listless breeze blew over his face driven only by the swooping cars that passed under Louie Armstrong International Airport. Matthew stood blinking in the weltering southern sun lancing through concrete pillars, his carryon luggage gripped in a damp hand.
He had never in his life begun to sweat so fast. It crawled around the collar of his polo and prickled down his spine. He had packed light for this trip but every second under the concrete structure made the bag feel heavy. Finally an empty taxi pulled up to the curb and he threw him self at the door with the desperation of a drowning rat sighting a scrap of wood in the churn.
Matthew made only the barest offerings of conversation to the driver. He was too tired to do more. Matthew was young, fresh out of college with a degree in finance. A medical supply firm, Hippacorp, had liked his resume alright and the low number he’d asked for his starting salary even more, enough to give him a chance at least. This was his first big boy business trip but the layovers and delays coming out of Minneapolis sucked every ounce of his nervous excitement from him. It was all soaked into the back of his shirt now. He had been dozing against the window so he jolted when the car pulled into the lot of the high-rise hotel on Canal Street.
“35.00 dollars, sir.” The driver said.
Matthew handed the man a fifty dollar bill and waved off the drivers half hearted attempt at change. His phone buzzed as he approached the front desk. He murmured his name to the beautiful young woman at the counter and glanced at his phone while scrawling his name on the check in form. Big dumb Brian had been in the same cohort as Matthew when he was hired at the firm. Matthew liked big dumb Brian.
“You here bro?”
“Yea” He texted back.
“Fuck yeah we going to bourbon sonnnnn” Came the instant reply.
“Alright, sir, room 308, you’ll use the elevator over to my left…”
He muttered a series of Mhm’s and thank you’s as he scraped the contents of his wallet and keycards off of the desk and typed a reply with his free hand. A handful of change that was crammed in the folds of the wallet spilled off the edge of the counter and cascaded noisily to the floor. Matthew’s face went hot as he scrambled for the rolling coins. It felt like the entire lobby was staring at him fumbling around like an idiot. A woman’s high heeled foot snapped down on a rolling quarter. He crammed his wallet into a pocket and struggled upright with his luggage and papers to try casually strolling to the row of elevators. He punched the up button harder than necessary.
“Excuse me,” A silky voice said from behind. “I think you dropped this.”
A slender hand held a quarter in his face. Prominent veins and a perfect manicure. Matthew glanced to the woman face. “Thanks.” As he fumbled with his phone to take the coin between thumb and forefinger an incoming buzz of a text message had him dropping both to the marble floor. “Oh, fuck me…” He muttered in despair and let go of the handle of his roll on luggage, which promptly tipped over with a clatter. “Fuck!”
The woman bent at the knees with astonishing grace for someone wearing a pencil skirt that tight and plucked both phone and quarter before he could do it himself. She glanced at the faceplate of his brand-new smartphone and the corner of her mouth quirked, bows high in amusement.
“Looks, like you have a text message from ‘Cuddlebear’? Girlfriend?” She asked.
Matthew took the phone from her hand quickly. “My fiancé.” He said sheepishly, pressing the lock button and sliding his phone into a jacket pocket. “Uh, she put that in there…as a joke.” He finished weakly.
“Congratulations! Are you two here to celebrate?”
“Um, no. I’m just here for the convention this weekend. She’s back home.” Matthew said, righting his luggage and hitting the up button again, desperate to be in his room where he could get his shit together in privacy.
“Well, then you should get her a nice gift while you’re here.” The woman stood near to his shoulder. He glanced sideways at her, not meeting her eyes. Her lipstick was the color of old blood which made the tracery of blue veins around her mouth more prominent in her pale face. “My friend has a wonderful boutique off of Royal. Here,” She flicked a business card from a delicate sliver case and offered it to him. He took it with an off hand, ‘Thanks, I’ll check it out.” and stuffed it into his jacket along side his phone.
The elevator dinged at the lobby floor and he grappled with his luggage again with a few more muttered thank you’s as the doors slid open. “Great, Great, thank you, okay bye…” He looked up to offer her a wry smile as he stepped inside and pressed the button for his floor.
Before it could slide shut her thin white wrist jutted forward and held the quarter out to him. “Don’t forget this.” The woman said, and Matthew reached out to take it, finally looking up to take in the whole of the woman’s face. The lipstick on her thin mouth drew most of his attention, but for the briefest moment he looked at her eyes. They were impossibly small and dark, like black glass beads. Matthew startled for a second, then the doors slid shut and he stood alone in the center of the elevator as it began to rise, holding the tarnished quarter before himself.
He was tired from the flight. He needed a nap before he did anything else. Matthew still held the coin in his fist when he slipped his keycard into the lock, dropped his suitcase at the door and plunged face first into the queen bed the company had booked him in. He was asleep within a moment, still dressed in his suit.
Katie’s ringtone woke him about an hour later.
Matthew jerked his face up from where he’d been drooling into the bend of his arm and licked his mossy teeth with a scowl. The first few bars of Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” started up again, muffled by his jacket pocket. He rolled onto his back and fished it out one handed, his other hand had clenched so tightly as he slept that it had gone numb.
He hit accept on the call and greeted his fiancé with a bleary, “Hey baby.”
“Where have you been? Oh my god, I’ve been texting you!” Her voice came high, tinny and way too loud through the speaker. Matthew winced and jerked it away from his ear. “Sweetie? Hello? Can you hear me?” Katie asked as he fumbled to take it off of speaker phone.
“Hey, yeah, I’m here. Sorry, had it on speaker.” He said. “Holy shit, I feel asleep hard.”
“Aw, was the flight bad?”
“Sucked.” Matthew said shortly. “Had a layover in Chicago for two hours.”
Katie made a sympathetic noise. He could hear the even chop, chop, chop of a knife on a cutting board. “You making dinner?” He asked.
“Mm, slaw for a catering gig tomorrow.”
“Your favorite.” He teased.
“Do not get me started.” She said, exasperated. “Overrated fucking side dish.” Matthew heard the clatter of a knife being chucked into their sink. She always mistreated her knives when making food for a pain in the ass client.
“The Brownstien wedding I take it?”
Her laugh was abrupt and with little humor. “How’d you guess?”
Mathew smiled. “Because you’ve been bitching about that menu for the past month?”
“Yeah, but only because I hate them and I hate the food they want me to make.” She scoffed. He heard her flop down with a soft whoosh, the living room sofa probably. “How’s the Big Easy?”
“Haven’t really seen it yet. Fell asleep in the taxi actually.” He answered honestly. “How was your day?” He unclenched his fist. In his palm lay a coin, a little bigger than a quarter but certainly not a quarter. Even as covered in grime as it was he could see that. Matthew squinted at the words minted on it’s face.
He realized Katie had been talking all the while.
“I miss you,” He said, to cover that he hadn’t heard any of her chatter. He turned the coin over in his hand. The stamp was worn from years of being handled, but he could make out a small relief of a birds wing and a date; 1780. Matthew frowned.
“I miss you, too, “She was saying. “Are you going out with the coworkers tonight?”
Matthew slid the weird coin back into his jacket pocket and shrugged it off his shoulders as he ambled into the bathroom to check the state of himself. He could hold off on shaving until tomorrow morning.
“Yeah, Brian’s in town already. He wants to hit Bourbon Street tonight.”
Katie made a weary hum into the phone.
“What?” Matthew asked.
“Nothing. I want you to go have fun.” She said evenly. “Just don’t have so much fun you overdo it.”
“And?” He prompted.
“And don’t have too much fun. I know how you get with a bunch of other boys.”
Matthew was grateful she wasn’t there to see him roll his eyes, it would have turned into an actual argument if she had been.
“I’ll be good,” His phone buzzed and he glanced at the incoming message from Brian, which was just a series of cocktail emojis. “I promise.” He said into the mouthpiece.
“I love you,” Katie sighed into the phone. “Bring me a nice souvenir. Like a whole shrimp po’ boy, okay?”
Matthew laughed. “Alright, I’ll see what I can get through TSA.”
“Love you.”
“Love you too.” He made a kissing noise and she returned it.
As he hung up Brian texted him a string of firework emojis interspersed with clinking beer steins and ending with a single question mark.
“Alright, assholes,” He texted back. “Where are we going?”
A clean shirt and twenty minutes later found Matthew outside of the Pat O’Brien’s bar on St. Peter Street among a throng of other tourists who had started drinking well before he had. A woman holding a garish green plastic cup shaped like a grenade yanked her top up one handed and whooped into the crowd. A few camera flashes went off and the number doubled when the woman stumbled and fell to the cobblestones, laughing and wallowing in her spilled drink and stagnant puddles in the potholes. Something about the display made him flinch.
“My dude!” A hand fell heavily on his shoulder and Matthew jerked around to fold the owner of the voice into a bear hug.
“Holy shit, man,” Matthew said clapping his coworker on the back. “It’s fuckin’ wild here!”
Brian grinned. “I know, isn’t it awesome?” Four other men were gathered behind him, the youngest of which was already eagerly extending his hand to Matthew.
“Anthony, from the Boston territory.” Brian introduced him. “Fresh meat in the company.” He gesture to the other three. “And you already know John, Eli, and Brian number two, from the west coast meetings.”
“Why do I have to be Brian number two?” Asked a man with an over done crest of ginger hair.
“Cuz’ I was the first at Hippacorp, and thus the only Brian that matters.” Brian said, flippantly. Brian was a big man, the breadth of his chest straining in his sweat soaked polo. He slapped Matthew on the back of the neck, hard and brotherly. “Now let’s go get drunk!” He crowed and began pushing his way through the chipped entrance of the bar.
They managed to commandeer a table in the courtyard and clustered around it with their drinks, five “Muthafuckin’ Hurricanes!” As Brian had crowed at the outside bartender. Goblets of liquor in hand they spoke as colleagues about the best selling catheters and speculums and numbers and top selling districts for as long as the first cocktail lasted. Brian lit cigarette after cigarette with delight.
“Man, once you have kids you can’t do this shit anymore.” Brian dragged deeply from his smoke. “Tina would beat my fuckin’ balls off if she knew I was getting to smoke without her.”
Matthew put down a third hurricane and a Sazerac, barking lewd jokes alongside Brian until one of his younger coworkers demanded they go out and walk Bourbon Street. Matthew followed on unsteady legs. They purchased electric green drinks from an open bar in the same sort of cup the woman he’d seen take a spill had carried. It was grotesquely sweet but he was too drunk to do anything save take long deep pulls from his yellow bendy straw.
Strip clubs dotted their path and all of them stopped to gawk at the scantily clad women clapping their asscheeks to the fuzzy bass pumped down from the upstairs clubs. Barkers called out to them to come inside and enjoy delights on their company cards, all of them away from home and family and such easy marks.
Brian weaved to a stop outside of a club called Shudderbug and watched slack jawed as a dancer lifted her muscled leg over her head to stretch on the doorframe, her eyes painted with kohl and body rippling in a mesh stocking.
“We gotta go in here.” Brian said. The younger men slapped the back of their hands on each others chests and jostled each other trying to get a better glimpse of the woman spreading herself along the doorframe.
The burly man posted up as both barker and bouncer waved his hand at them, beckoning. “Yea, boys get in here! Come get that big easy!”
“Nah, I can’t.” Matthew held back from the press of his fellows who jeered and booed” No, look Katie won’t like it!” He said in explanation. Anthony chucked his empty grenade at his head and he ducked. The novelty cup bounced and clattered the uneven street to roll into a sunken sewer grate.
“Hey, dick!” Matthew shouted. The boys only laughed and pushed in and up the stairs to the strip club floor. Brian pumped his fists in the air and led the charge, leaving Matthew alone on the street, swaying and well past drunk.
“I’ll see you assholes tomorrow!” He yelled at the last retreating back.
It was close to midnight and the sounds of revelry were a distant roar in his ears. Another walk up window was next to the strip club that had claimed his friends and he stumbled up to it and ordered some sort of daiquiri. Way down Bourbon Street was dark and lonely and he was pulled toward the solitude. Drink in hand he began to wander.
The gaslights that fronted houses cast a tremulous light across plaster and stone. Matthew wandered alleyways redolent with the smell of piss, vomit and garbage that sweltered even in the dead air of evening. Iron work fences led him in a confounded route over and around streets that weren’t clear on the tourist map in his hotel room. Inebriated and still exhausted from his travels, Matthew thought of laying down on a narrow sidewalk and never getting up.
Actually, he had no fucking idea where his hotel was at this point. His head swiveled right and left, which only left him more disoriented and sick. Matthew lowered himself to sit heavily on the uneven curb. He sat in the dark, elbows propped on his knees, solo cup dangling from his fingers, and glanced up. The street sign showed him at the intersection of Ursulines and Royal. He stared at the weird flicker on the sign reading “Calle Royal” for a moment before realizing the light wasn’t thrown from a car’s head light, but from a point behind him somewhere.
Matthew turned. A few businesses had signs hanging from iron balconies, their windows dark, but a little ways down a pair of gas lanterns illuminated a sandwich board painted with the weathered, chipped image of a hummingbird. There were two lit neon signs in the window, one that simply flashed ‘open’ and a looping cursive of glass over the lintel that said “Colibri”.
The sign twigged his memory and he pulled a card from his pocket, the one the weird woman had given him at the hotel. He screwed one eye shut to read the script without the letters doubling up.
“COLIBRI: Evocative and unique scents for all.
EST 1784
C. Royal, New Orleans
M. Espinosa, proprietor. “
He had wanted to get Katie something special. If this place was open so late it had to be some sort of fancy, bespoke shit that would get him the sort of intense, high suction praise he loved from scoring a meaningful gift.
He rose unsteadily, sloshing the dregs of his melted daiquiri over his knuckles, as he stumbled to the heavy door. When he reached for the handle the door swung inward, startling him.
“Mr. Richmond, I’m so glad you came to see us.” Said the woman from his hotel’s lobby. Had he told her his name? Her face was a handful of features now, even more difficult to focus on than when he had glance at it through the elevators closing doors.
God, he hadn’t been this drunk since he had gotten with Katie. And now he was wasted in someone’s fancy shop.
Matthew tried to cover his stumble over the threshold. A thin white hand took his plastic cup from him.
“Oh, that seems to be empty.” Said the blood red smile. “Let’s get you another. Why don’t you settle down over there while I get it for you?” Her sharp nails flicked to a velvet settee. Matthew plopped down, blowing up a welter of dust and coughed. He looked around the shop. Bottles, grimy and new, round, and small, and large and square, corked with ornate blossoms of glass or eroded cork lined shelves from knee height to well over his head.
“A nice whiskey.” The pale hand pressed a tumbler into his own. He tried to look up, to see the woman’s face, and found he couldn’t take it in. “On the house.”
“Madame will be with you shortly.” She said as she departed, heels clicking on the old cypress floor, leaving him alone.
His head lolled against the aged velvet back of the settee. His eyes were bleary and he blinked against the inebriation and squinted up at the ceiling which was hung with an intricate chandelier. Hummingbirds were painted around the crown molding, seeming to shudder and dance. For a disjointed moment he thought he saw one of them dart towards a tulip shaped sconce on the light fixture and dip its beak inside. Matthew tilted forward to rest his elbows on his knees and squint upwards willing it to happen again.
“Mr. Richmond?” A voice queried, deep and rich and accented. He jolted upright.
Another woman, this one aged in the elegant, beautiful fashion few women managed. Her figure was trim and somber in a tailored grey cotton suit. Her hair was long, black steamed with silver, and pulled into a simple elegant bun atop her head. Silver baubles dangled from her ears and a choker of rubies adorned her neck and spilled down her narrow chest. She was so upright and beautiful with that bright spill of gems running down her narrow chest, so poised and refined that Matthew felt like a little boy again, like he had when he saw his aging aunt Mary for the last time, before she took her own life with pills to spare herself the indignity of cancer’s withering death.
He straightened instantly.
“Yes, uh, call me Matt.” He said, pulling himself upright from the sinking seat. His knees wobbled a bit when he extended his hand.
“And you can call me Marietta.” She smiled. Welcome to my little boutique.”
She took it gracefully. Her nails were lacquered the same shade as her ruby necklace. An uneasiness tolled in his chest like a bell, one heard from a distance more felt than heard. He wanted to leave and he put his discomfort down to not wanting to make an ass of himself.
“Ma’am, I’m um, christ, I’m sorry, I was out with some coworkers it’s my first time here and I’m sorry, I’m sorry I think I drank a little too much to be shopping. Can I sit for a second and get a cab? I’m sorry.” The words jumbled and collided. He offered her his signature smile, the sheepish lopsided one that typically worked on women. The one that insinuated that he was just a sweet overgrown schoolboy who just didn’t know any better shucks and golly.
She waved off his excuses with a pshaw. “Nonsense! You’re fine. I love having visitors from far away in my perfumery.”
“I didn’t think a shop like this would be open so late.”
“I like to keep unusual hours,” The woman said with a small smile. “It brings me unusual clients.”
He didn’t know what to say to such an enigmatic thing so he kept his smile frozen and nervously squeezed her hand harder than he meant before letting it go. She gestured for him to take his seat.
“Now,” She smoothed her skirt over her knees and sat on the cushion next to him. “What can we make for you? Something for yourself? A gift for someone special?”
“My fiancé.” Matthew said and took a longer sip from his tumbler, too long for something that tasted so expensive.
“Oh, congratulations!” Marietta cooed. “What’s her name?”
“Katie.”
“Katie! And what’s Katie like?”
Matthew let his head roll back in a way he hoped looked wistful and not shithoused. “She’s… a chef…uh, she grew up in Kansas. We met when she did the catering for my friends wedding…”
Marietta cut him off with a laugh. “That’s what she does and where she lived, not who she is. What sort of a woman is she though? To you?” She reached over his shoulder, fingers lingering over a row of bottles before selecting one and plucking off the cork.
“Huh?” He drained the rest of his whiskey in a gulp.
Marietta withdrew a strip of paper from an inner pocket of her jacket, dipped one end in to the bottle and gave it an airy wave. “Katie isn’t her job and she’s not Kansas,” She said. “What’s her personality like?”
She handed the strip to Matthew, who gamely took it and waved it under his nose as he figured he was expected to. It was aggressively floral with an impression of institutional chemicals burning through the first impression. It was too much, too intentionally cloying as if it was meant to cover years of of use, and sweat, and life.
It smelled like the first apartment he and Katie had rented together in northern Idaho. The thing had been a shithole, truth be told, but there had been a bright bubble of glee and terror of his future in his chest when they signed the lease. The two of them laid on the old carpeted floor together the night before before moving their things in, empty beer bottles ringed around them like a summoning circle while they picked out faces in the water stains and cracks that marred the ceiling. Katie had insisted the outline of one looked just like a Hirschfeld drawing of Peter Lorre. He didn’t know who either of those people were and she had grabbed a note book from her purse to try to draw what she meant to show him. The drawing was incomprehensible and she pinched his side every time he said it looked like an eggplant, a flounder, a Chicago skyline, an increasingly absurd array of things until their clothes were gone and she was riding him, both of them laughing and breathing the blistering fumes from the carpet cleaner.
He still didn’t know who Hirschfeld was.
“She’s amazing.” He said simply. Marietta hummed in a way that meant ‘go on’. The tumbler was full again on the small table in front of him and he reached for it to take another drink and to buy his thoughts some time.
“She’s….funny.” He said. “She’s ferocious and funny and always knows what she wants…” He paused, embarrassed by how opaque that sounded. “Uh,” He stuttered. Marietta hummed again and screwed the cap off of another bottle. The smell of something like a wet bar rag hit him with a violence.
In one of the dives he used to go to with Jake, a month after he and Katie started seeing one another, he told his friend: “She makes me feel like everything is possible, you know? Like I don’t have to be alone?” He had said to Jake, bleary eyed and close to last call, the third pitcher of cheap beer empty between them. “I wanna be with her, man. But she scares the shit out of me. She’s like a, like a big flower on a tree and I’m a little bud next to her but my little bud is just gonna rot off the branch?” Matthew had pitched his voice into a question for the sake of his friend who had started to smirk. In hind sight he knew there was no question in his words. Ill defined as they were, he meant them.
“We keep peeling layers off of each other and every one of them is better than the last. I fuckin’…fucking love this girl, man.”
His old friend Jake laughed in his face and picked up the pitcher to drain the dregs. When Jake plonked the pitcher back on the table he only said: “Gay.”
Matthew didn’t answer questions from his friends about Katie in any meaningful way after that. Some unnamed fear had crawled cold inside of him and he had felt its wriggle before. He would do anything to avoid it. As stung as his ego had felt, he was more appalled at the thought his openness had permanently tarnished what he felt for her. He was embarrassed.
In the claustrophobic air of the shop Matthew began to sweat again. The gentle churn of the overhead fan did nothing to cool him.
“You know, I think I could create the perfect thing for you.” Marietta patted his hand. “Why don’t I make a scent for you that will perfectly compliment you?”
“It’s not for me, it’s for Katie. I told you I was here to get a gift for Katie.” Came the muzzy thought.
“That, um, yeah, that would be nice? As long as I think Katie will like it…” He said. “Uh, um…” He reached into his back pocket for his wallet. “I don’t know if I have the money…” He flipped it open and rifled through his cards. If there was one thing he knew about salesmen it was that the suggestion of poverty was a conversation ender. He wanted to leave. He was drunk and tired.
Marietta placed a gentle hand over his fumbling fingers. Matthew glanced up and squinted. The jewels on her neck flashed in the flickering light and hurt his eyes. The touch of her fingers was so kind.
“I think you know what to give me.” She said.
And Matthew only slid his hand into his pocket and pulled out the worn coin. She held out her hand and he placed it into her palm.
When she smiled, it was a smile hungry and youthful.
“Wonderful, Matthew. Let’s retire to the courtyard.” She said, rising from her seat. No dust clung to her clothes. “I find that selecting scents works best in the open air. You can get so much more from the experience of it.”
He followed her through a side door, glass in hand and full again. She steadied him with a hand on his elbow.
“Just through here.” She said. “I’ll be with you shortly.”
The courtyard was small, two iron chairs sat opposite each other with a low glass topped table between them. Matthew dropped heavily into one of the chairs and his head lolled a heavy circuit to take in his surroundings. Flowering vines twined up the old brick, bushes clustered in the garden divots which also were in blossom, heavy and white and reeking their perfume around him. In each corner of the little square a tree grew, branches twining to form a natural canopy of leaves and fruit. A hum buzzed all around, so deep Matthew could feel it in his spine.
He sat in one of the chairs and drank. The blossoms around him put out such an intoxicating, soothing scent that he dozed for a moment.
“Let’s begin, Mr Richmond.”
Matthew jerked upright. When he glanced down he saw an array of bottles in front of the Madame and another full glass of whisky. He reached for it, because he knew he was meant to do so.
“Alright.” He slurred.
Marietta drew another strip of paper from her jacket and dipped it into an open bottle.
“If I were to make a scent for you,” She said, offering the strip. “Would something like this this appeal?”
Matthew lurched forward and inhaled.
Cut grass. Summer sun overhead. His uncle shouting; “Don’t be a fucking girl!” A shovel poised over the twitching body of a snake. “Come on, come on!” Matthew bringing the shovel down.
“There you go,” Marietta said. “Now this.”
When she held another strip of paper up to him and he took it and inhaled. Musk and close quarters, the smell animal thick.
When he was a teenager, Matthew was a good track runner, not the best, but good. He helped win games and everyone adored him for it. Wet soil soaked his nose in the rising sun as his legs pumped. The drifts of mist billowing off the spongy asphalt looked so good and magical as he pounded the track. Matthew loved running. Nothing to think about, just go fast, follow the track, no choices. The damp of the morning clung to him. In the showers after practice he had glanced up to see the track coach watching, rubbing himself and looked away quickly and silently. He ran for one more year and then quit for weed and girls and basement parties.
Matthews face felt hot. His stomach roiled. Whiskey sloshed over his fingers and it was the only thing that made him understand how badly his hands were shaking.
“Now this.” Marietta held another strip to his face. He inhaled and it was the closet when he was eight. The carpet always had a weird smell to it. Strawberry candy on his cousins breath.
“It’s fine.” His cousin said ”Everyone does it.”
Matthew struggled to sit up. Marietta was holding up another piece of paper to his nose and he pushed it away.
“I don’t want anymore.” He said.
“Oh, sweetheart,” Marietta said. “We still have such a long way to go.” She snapped her fingers and her immaculate assistant came into view. “But lets have a little break while I pick out the next samples.”
A jar of something was held under his nose and he reared back enough for the contents to come into focus.
“Coffee beans are a wonderful way to cleanse the nasal palate.” She gestured for him to lean over and inhale and he took a shaky breath. At his elbow the assistant with the empty face poured another glut of liquor into his tumbler.
“I think…I think I’m done.” He said.
“Just a courtesy.” Marietta said, sweeping the bottles off of the table and clicking away. “It’s there if you want it.”
Left alone again Matthew had nothing to do. He blinked around the courtyard, looking for the exit, thinking he could quietly, politely leave, but he couldn’t seem to locate the door they had come through. Nothing but the flowing vines covering the high brick walls and the chirp of hidden frogs, the gurgling of a fountain set into the western wall. He sipped and looked, sipped and looked, tried to look sober and unbothered. There was a glass of water on the table to his left. He stared at it, then drained his tumbler in one gulp, the water in three.
The greenery seemed to spin around him. He buried his face in his hands. The rough, raw scent of his own palms hadn’t changed from when he was young, his posture the same all hunched and still listening to his parents raised voices flaying one another through the heat register of his second floor bedroom.
“Do you even give a fuck, Geoff?”
“I clearly give a fuck, Karen, or I wouldn’t go into work every day while you sit around the fucking house-“
“You think I just sit around the fucking house? I just watch tv and eat chips while poor fucking you suffers through your fucking day!? Who takes care of Matt and Tim? Who feeds them and makes sure they do their homework and washes their clothes? It’s not you!”
A door slamming. An engine starting in the driveway.
Clink, clink, clink, clink.
“It’s also good to smell your own skin.” Matthew pulled his face out of his hands to see Marietta placing bottles in a neat row along the glass table top. “Even better than coffee beans. It truly restores the senses and makes you remember who you are.”
He could only stare at her.
“Now,” She unscrewed the cap to the first bottle and he screwed his eyes shut. “Let’s continue.”
Acetone burned his nostrils. Tom and he spent most of eighth grade face down in paper bags full of glue before earth sciences. Acrid urine from the boys restroom. The unnatural lavender scented cleaner that never masked it, that only made the stink heavier, worse.
“This one now.”
Sweet and cheap, bottom shelf wine that came in two liter bottles and his mother in the recliner his father usually sat in like a desposed queen watching her country burn all around her. The cloying stench of her untoward body and the rot on her breath when she said: “You can go skateboard with your friends until ten at night but you can’t pass a goddamned english class?”
There was a beating in his ears, more felt than heard. His eyes couldn’t focus. It was how drunk he was, that was the only reason his scattered mind could supply for how the air around him seemed to judder and shake.
“Now this.” Marietta uncorked an amber bottle no bigger than her thumb. She didn’t offer it to him on a strip of paper or hold out the bottle itself but the smell hit him like a bullet right in the center of his face.
Earthy and fungal. The girl’s name was Abigail and she had started as a freshman along with Matthew. She plodded the halls carrying stacks of 17 magazines and a binder covered in stickers of cartoon tigers. Stacked on top were two VHS cassette tapes of 007 movies. She carried them everywhere and never spoke. Her hair was always a rats nest and the other students curled their lip when she scuttled by.
“Why does she always smell like cold cream of mushroom soup?” Beth, the hot sophomore asked no one, but garnering the laughter of everyone not Abigail in the hall one day in late winter. Matthew laughed the loudest and was rewarded for it. Normally Beth shrugged his arm off when he threw it around her shoulder when she said something mean and funny but she didn’t this time. He had a bet with his friends that he could definitely at the very least finger her before the end of semester.
Abigail scuffed her shoe on the ground, pulled her math book from her locker, and scurried away clutching her binder and tapes to her chest.
In Matthew’s chest a festering boil of contempt and hate grew. She didn’t even seem embarrassed that her hair looked like shit or that she wore the same raggedy sweatshirt everyday. She painted flowers on her face sometimes like a little kid. It wasn’t like she was weird and smart like the scrawny pieces of shit the teachers fawned over. She was just weird and useless. And she just walked around everyday like it was her fucking right. Like she could just be like that and not understand what a little worm she was. The pathetic bitch.
A little pop sounded in the courtyard. Another bottle, the smell hot and gushing and reeking copper tang. The smell of a weaker animal in fear and pain.
Matthew and Tom and their other best friend Aaron had the best time barking “HI ABIGAIL” right into her face when they passed her between classes, just to watch her jerk away and scuttle faster down the hall in her cheap, worn Keds. One time she even tripped and tipped her armload of magazines and tapes all over the ground. The surge of glee Matthew felt while watching her cry and scramble to gather them all up had to be how lions felt when they ripped into a gazelle.
The taste of her dismay was delicious on the back of his tongue and he had felt so triumphant he kicked one of her magazines across the floor and sent it skittering away from her snatching fingers. Everyone thought it was hilarious watching Abigail dive after it except for Ms. Reese, who hauled him into the principles office and had him suspended for three days.
“What am I supposed to do with you?” His mother had hissed, hands braced on the kitchen sink. His father hand’t been living there for about a year, though he dropped in to fuck his mom and give his little brother legos sometimes. “Like, what am I supposed to do?”
Matthew leaned over the arm of his chair and vomited onto the paving stones. His nose ran and he scrubbed his arm across it.
“I don’t want anymore.” He choked, begged in a child’s timid voice.
“I want more.” Marietta said hungrily.
When Matthew looked up, her eyes had shrunk into little black beads. The rubies around her neck bled and spread a stain on her skin. Her arms blurred with motion and her face seemed to melt into a vicious point. Behind her a blurred green figure darted back and forth.
“I want more.” Marietta whispered and matthew watched appalled and frozen as a long pointed tongue darted out across the low glass table and touched his face.
Another bottle was placed before him and it fell with awful finality.
Clink.
“Don’t.” Matthew begged.
Marietta pulled the stopper from it with relish and the whole day came back. Wet mulch, cold air, tobacco, fresh blood, secret marrow from the bone, layer after layer of smell so visceral and close at hand.
It had always lived inside of him as a fact of his life but he had managed to look away from it for years, to cordon it off from his everyday existence and deny how it leaked into how he lived in the world.
The road that ran between his childhood house and the high school was mostly park. In early autumn the Idaho air was crisp with frost and heavy with the scent of pine. Matthew, Aaron, James, and Tom used to meander through it’s back trails, smoking cheap cigarettes and garbage weed and fucking around before going to watch porn back at Matthew’s. They always stopped at this one particular bend in the bark dust path to swing off of a low branch and bullshit for a while. Every day after school they had done this and no one had never intruded on their boyish solitude.
Until one day in September the sound of footsteps came shuffling around the path.
Aaron dropped his cigarette in the mulch and stomped on it as Matthew dropped down from the tree he’d been climbing.
“Dude, hide the joint! No, just throw it away!”
“I just fucking bought this!”
“Shhh! Someone’s coming!”
They were expecting the footfalls to come from some older couple out for a walk, at worst a park security guard. But it was just Abigail, holding her pile of magazines to her chest and walking down the middle of the path like- Like it was her fucking right. To just be walking around not knowing what she was, what she looked like.
Tom snorted when he saw her and relit his joint.
“Thank god.” He said. James waggled his tongue at her as she approached but she didn’t look up, just maintained her pace, eyes on the ground.
“Hi, Abigaaaail.” Aaron sang to no response.
She pretended not to register their presence at all and that set Mathews blood boiling.
“Aaron said, ‘Hi, Abigail”.” Matthew stalked to cut her off. “Hi Abigail. You don’t want to say Hi?” She moved to go around him and he butted his face into her downcast one. “You can’t say fuckin’ Hi? Are you too retarded to say Hi?”
Pop. Another cork. Another bottle. Matthew squirmed in his iron seat and tried not to inhale, but the body breathes in regardless. Fetid earth, mold, rotting pine needles.
A ravine had run alongside the path. When Matthew was little, all the kids called it a creek. It usually had a sluggish spill of water flowing down it’s center, except in the driest summers. It wasn’t until he was older he found out it was just a sewage runoff from the suburbs. They had played in shit water as kids like it was some natural spring from a fairy tail. He always smelled the water pooling in the hollows of the trench as a teen and knew it’s reek for what it was.
Aaron’s hand was on his arm at one point. Matthew caged Abigail off from her attempts to duck by and his voice was rising:
“You don’t say Hi? Huh? You don’t know how to say Hi to some one trying to be nice, huh?”
She made a sharp motion to dip around his left side and he shoved her with all of his strength.
He had blazed with satisfaction when she pitched backward over a fallen branch, his friend’s call of alarm distant in his ears. She was going to fall right on her stupid fat ass and ruin all of her stupid magazines in the shit water.
That certainly happened, but more than that. Her momentum carried her back over a flat rock and over the drop into the ravine. She landed badly on a boulder sticking out of the mud and they all heard the bone snap. Matthew and Aaron and James and Tom froze. Matthew was the only one standing directly over her when she rolled onto her back with a confused, pained whine and brought her arm up to cradle against her chest. Her forearm bent unnaturally and in a wash of blood he saw the white gleam of her ulna poking though. She looked at it with the same bewilderment he did, then looked up at him with wide wet eyes.
Then she began to howl and Matthew was out of there, back towards his house at a dead run. When he got inside he went straight to his room and laid down. He laid there for days, somehow came down with the flu which kept him out of school and in his mother’s rare consideration. He waited for the call to come, from the police or Abigail’s mother or maybe the school.
It never did. It wasn’t until he graduated that he realized it wouldn’t. No one was coming to punish him. He could do things and get away with it. The mantle of a coward fit him like a tailored suit. Just like his aw shucks smile that got him out of trouble with women who weren’t Katie or his mother.
Pop. A medicinal smell, the smell of damp skin in plaster, old glossy paper. Matthew smelled it when he passed her in the halls when he went back to school. It was easy. He didn’t have to change, didn’t have to say anything, just follow the track, run, not think. He could slide around anything if he just stayed on the track.
“And that’s what I wanted.” Marietta whispered with delight.
Matthew cracked his eyelids open and saw tufts of moss blanketing a cracked brick. He had fallen from his chair and lay with his cheek pressed to the ground. He couldn’t move. His stomach roiled and all around a tremendous thrumming consumed him. Under it a thin laugh burbled up.
“It’s so good.” The voice of her assistant moaned.
“It’s a good one.” Marietta said, her voice hushed and excited. “I know, this is a very good one…”
A stiletto clad foot kicked at his shoulder, rolling him onto his back. Two pairs of black eyes and two long needle beaks regarded his prone form. There was no way it was close to sunrise but the figures that bent over him were wreathed in a terrible glow, the air around them seizured. He tried to move his limbs and found he could not.
He couldn’t even find the strength to scream when the beaks dipped down and began to drink, the thrum and pulse held him to the ground.
He lost consciousness.
Matthew smelled coffee first, heard a voice second.
“Hey, man, Can’t have you sleeping here, okay?”
Matthew coughed and opened his eyes. He lay with his cheek pressed to a welter of old moss covered brick, a liberal handful of coffee beans scattered across the ground. His head ached and his shirt stuck to his back in the heat of the August morning.
“Hey,” The voice came above him and a ways off. “Tell me you aren’t dead because seriously I can’t deal with another dead tourist.”
He sat up abruptly and sent the young man with the push broom jerking back and dropping the cigarette he held in his other hand.
“Jesus.”
“Yeah,” Matthew scrubbed a hand over his face and looked around. “Sorry…”
Casting his eyes around he saw he had woken in the ruins of a courtyard. Half fallen walls bordered the square, pulled down by age and climbing weeds. A pipe dripped fetid water into a neglected pond over on the western wall. A vine covered in orange trumpet shaped blossoms curled around the eroded masonry at the base of the ruined spout. He knew he was Matthew and nothing else.
“Cool, you’re not dead. Awesome. You gotta go though.” The young man absently pushed his broom through a layer of dirt on the sidewalk. “Uh, you need the number for a cab…or…”
Two hummingbirds darted back and forth among the blossoms, their wings beating, beating, beating.
Matthew gained his feet with a quickness that sent his guts topsy turvy.
“No, thank you,” He said. “I’m sorry, I guess I can’t hold my booze like I used to.” He offered an apologetic look to the street sweeper. “Thanks for not calling the cops on me. I’ll get out of your way.”
Matthew moved to flee through an opening in the tumbled down walls and was halted by the boy’s voice again.
“Don’t forget your package!”
Matthew turned and looked down at the space he had laid in. There was a small red paper bag sprouting a froth of yellow tissue paper sitting neatly on the cobblestone. He lunged to snatch it up and nodded to the street sweeper and made a smile that was more of a wince. He plunged into the narrow streets at a clip that was not quite a run and didn’t stop until he hit the paving stones of Riverfront Park. The river had a dark, spicy odor to it, and while the humidity made him feel claustrophobic, the scant air off of the Mississippi River cleared his lungs. He looked into the open blue sky and inhaled.
The bag still dangled from his fingers.
In his pocket his phone trilled with a weird ringtone. He let it go until it stopped, staring into the mass of tissue paper. Another chirp from his phone, then another tinny ringtone, its notes unfamiliar. Matthew raised the bag to his face and hesitantly inhaled.
Laying in his bed in his childhood home, his comforter still smelled the same. That seemed unfair considering his Grandmother was gone and he was only back for the funeral. Every thing should have looked and smelled different-
Matthew swung the bag overhead like a sling and hurled it as far as he could out into the slow slide of the Mississippi River. A few birds dipped to investigate the bobbing red paper and veered off abruptly.
Matthew turned away and walked towards what he thought was a street he should walk down and thus his hotel. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and called the first number back, the one that said “Cuddlebear”.
“Sweetie? Hey, how was your night?” A voice answered on the first ring. “Are you ready for the convention?”
He was Matthew, he knew that. He knew he liked women. He knew he had a hotel to stay in. He knew those things and he knew his nose was full of a thousand scents and none of them meant anything to him. He knew his body was sweating and his head pounded. He knew nothing else aside from that.
“Um, yeah,” Matthew said to the woman on the phone. “Sorry, who is this?”