Smell Is A Superpower

Smell is a superpower. At least, it is for my wife. Crossing the street arm in arm, she’d proudly pronounce that she could smell the top deck of the Number 12A bus, the one she would get on Tuesdays in 1987 after Girl Guides. She once told me she’d caught a whiff of Aimee Hepburn’s fridge, yet she hadn’t been at Aimee’s house in fifteen years and more. Looking through some carpet samples, she confessed she could smell Mrs. Heather’s cupboard, a cleaning lady from her primary school, likely long dead.

Now she’s gone too, and I’ve discovered the whole house smells of her. The garden smells of her. The world smells of her. Yet not one of these olfactory insights will let me conjure her from the past like the memories she could recall. That’s where she is imprisoned now: my past.

Her memories, those smells, little torments.