"The Smell of Flowers" by Jennifer Anne Gordon
The Smell of flowers
Lilacs
I stick my fingers inside my mind, past my eyes and into the darker unused parts of my brain. I mine my atrophied thoughts, my dusty long covid concussion of my creativity.
I try to think of the names of flowers, I know sunflower, and roses, I know daisy, and lilac…Today I cannot picture what they look like in my head.
They are only sun-bleached polaroids and double exposed glossy pictures picked up from the CVS. Most photos are unrecognizable as if they are taken from someone else’s life.
Someone else’s flowers.
We had a lilac bush in our front yard. It separated our house from big Missy’s house, from Timmy; no longer able to use his legs. His mother next door was always yelling at him to not use his crutches on their new hardwood floor.
I could not smell the gin on her breath from the lilac bush divide, but I could feel it.
Today, I do not remember the way lilacs smell, but can feel them in my mouth. They are delicate and chewy like a rubber band. I remember the day when I was small that I ate them as if they were love.
A love I could understand.
I remember there were lilacs floating in the puddles of our uneven front yard, I remember my mother was unconscious on the couch while I grew restless. I brought shampoo to the puddles and washed my hair in that lilac water as if I were a white witch. I ignored the bird poop that also floated there.
Later that night when my father came home, and I was able to wake up my mother from her unnatural slumber, they made me take another shower.
They made me erase the lilacs. Timmy died before he was 3, still living in a home with unscratched hardwood floor, the stale air in their house gin soaked and lilac kissed.
Sunflowers
I was almost thirteen the first time my mother let me walk up the three cement stairs that led into our house without her holding on to me or standing behind me. None of this made sense, because of course I was home alone after school from the age of ten. Off the bus, in the house, making my own food. Walk to the store, weave my body like a silky cat through the sunflowers, their faces as large as mine, more frightening, almost too alive, buy my father his newspaper, buy my mother her cigarettes if she leaves a note, come home the same way—in and out of the flowers. Their large leaves leaving little slices up and down my arms. But—if my mother was there with me...she held my arm. Afraid I would fall. Telling me always to hold onto the railing. She wanted me to walk up the steps one at a time as if I had a broken leg. In my twenties I moved back to my childhood home. Dead dad, and my mom had left for a Miami mid-life crisis. I started to have panic attacks in the night, waking up from nightmares I didn’t understand. Dreams of sunflowers growing up and out of my throat. I found myself in the living room screaming in the middle of the night. Once I was in front of the open refrigerator waking as the glass bottle of Snapple Iced Tea shattered at my feet. The dark room smelled like dead sunflowers and autumn. Then there was the time I, a somnambulist, traveled from my bedroom. I woke up when my mouth filled with blood, and my thumb shattered at the bottom of the stairs, sunflower seeds at my feet
Roses
In my brain they have no scent, no wet earth, no rain. There is barely anything I can remember. I cannot remember their blooms, their buds. I have never eaten roses. I only remember their baby thorns, so much like the kitten I found in a bag near the dumpster in the projects my cousin lived in. That cat, orange and scared. His little claws dug into my skin because I squeezed it too hard. I tried to love it too soon—too hard.
A white cat—its paws and little legs were stippled with my easily bloodied hands. I remember that sweet copper smell, like pennies from a wishing well. Like pennies from the water fountain at the mall, the day of the Barbie fashion show. Band-Aids still decorate my fingers. Even now when I see a small white cat, I wish I could remember the roses.
Jennifer Anne Gordon is an award-winning author and podcast host. Her debut novel Beautiful, Frightening and Silentwon the Kindle Book Award for Best Horror/Suspense for 2020. Her novel Pretty/Ugly won the Helicon Award for Best Horror for 2022, and the Kindle Book Award for Best Novel of the Year (Reader’s Choice). Her novel Perfect Wives, Perfect Lives is forthcoming from Podium Publishing.
Her essays have been featured in Miniskirt Magazine, Tangled Locks Journal, Lumina, and Flash Glass, and she is a Best of the Net Nominee and currently lives in Rural NH.
Instagram/Threads: @jenniferannegordon_author