Scent of Unseen

His shop, tucked away on a street that didn’t have a name, was the kind you only found when you weren’t looking for it. Inside, the air was a labyrinth of smells—soft lilac curling into the sharper bite of pine resin, the warmth of vanilla shot through with the bitter tang of coffee grounds.

But it wasn’t perfumes people came for. Not really.

The customers were young women. They came in with their strange requests, eyes wide, voices trembling like the strings of a barely-tuned violin. He listened, patient as always, as they described the things they wanted to carry in tiny, glass-bottled memories.

“Can you do the scent of my baby’s neck?” one asked, voice breaking on the last word. “That sweet, milky smell, right here.”

She touched her clavicle like it was a sacred thing, her fingers trembling.

Another wanted Marlboro Reds in a 200 mL bottle. “So I can smell them after I quit,” she explained, her laugh sharp and humorless.

And there were darker requests. The sour, suffocating air of a nursing home, the air dense in disinfectant and despair. Garbage baking under a pitiless summer sun.

One asked for the scent of her boyfriend, that cinnamony ticklishness where her shoulder met her neck. She smiled when she said it, but her eyes were hollow.

Diesel. Sweat. Burning foliage. The copper tang of blood. He had heard it all before, but he never turned them away.

And then there was the woman who asked for mushroom risotto. She told him about the last dinner she had cooked for her husband, the one who had fallen in love with the dog-walker.

Her voice cracked as she said the Shiitake slices looked like decapitated ears floating in the rice. She cried as she talked and did not stop.

He nodded and wrote it all down, never asking why. That was not his job.

His job was to distill their stories into scents, to trap their heartbreak and longing in delicate bottles they could hold in their hands. He did not want to know what they did with them after that.