“What is wrong with my smell?”
“Something non-human which urges a man to trespass the boundaries. As a botanist, years of working with flowers has gifted me a kin sense of smell. Do you remember the last time when you came to my store? It was three days ago and we had just a brief encounter. Tonight, before you come in, I felt you. I wasn’t ignoring you as you silently entered. I had closed my eyes to detect each of your steps getting closer by your odorous intensity.”
“So the third room was really meant for me.”
“Well not precisely, as the scent is not of a flower type. I should confess this time your odor is a hundred times stronger.”
“What do you feel?”
“Something strange burns the two bulbs of olfactory up to a part of the brain isolated from language, the emotional; therefore very inexplicable in words. I say there is in it a vague message of remembering something lost, which like glue sticks to mind, crawls across brain back and forth in a quest. Now it is your turn.”
“My psychoanalyst has advised me that the fear of whiteness is the bridge between consciousness and subconscious which holds hidden the secrets of my true identity. Stay on it and do not run from it until you get something. My subconscious has to infiltrate through the total blockage of consciousness. I could not read the message in the whiteness as long as it is interpreted as blankness.”
“There is a message in whiteness for you?”
“Still, I don’t know. When you terrified me of imprisonment, your momentarily viscous silence and the notion of solitary in an empty room brought my whiteness anxiety back. You and the room blurred to white for a second. I had to maintain in the moment more, therefore, I asked you to let me stay alone in the room in a hope to see again.”
“And what have you seen in the darkness?” He asked with curious eyes as they have reached the cashier station and stood in front of each other.”
“I saw who stole the white painting off the wall of my psychoanalyst, hammered two nails into my wall, and hanged the painting on the wall.”
“Who?”
“I; and later, I guess, saw something on it at home which was too much at the moment for me to bear, therefore, I took it off the wall and hid it behind my big mirror. The painting at the back of the mirror, had created the woman in the mirror, a beast with blue glares.”
“Why did you steal it?”
“He had hanged it on his wall so that I remember a terrible mystery behind the whiteness from the back of my mind. The painting should have shown something. According to my subconscious I was not stealing it because I believed it was mine.”
“A mystery? How can you differentiate an illusion from a recollection of a fact?”
“If I were able to see me at the right age in the dream. This is one of a few touchstones I have been equipped with by my psychoanalyst. I guess that is enough for today psychiatry session.”
“I have also a secret to show you.”
He went to the cash register table took something and came back. “Open your hand.” She opened her hand. He placed the gift in her hand. “A dead bee?” she said while laughing.
“It is you. After you had left the last time, for hours, I could not fight my mind to forget you. I had an unbearable urge to imprison you in the third room to fill the room with your exotic scent in order to decipher the evolutionary codes in your odor and to discover the unique biology which emits it. I threw a live bee into the third room on that day. Today I found it dead, this is the bee.”
“Tonight, you wanted to see me in the third room.”
“Yes, the whole thing was just a show for that. You are lucky since no hypothesis came to my mind. Now you show me the secret that you are hiding in your hand.”
“You saw it,” She blushed, gave him the piece of paper. As he was opening the crumpled paper, said to himself, “Watch out man for the scent.” She blushed again; “Still a ten-year-old girl in me.” He questioned as staring at the paper, “A man with a shovel?” he gave the paper back to her.
“A good omen to start the night.”
She went to the end of the hall where the silver bags had been placed. There was a new sign, “The main ingredient of the Miracle Fertilizer has been enhanced. The price of each silver bag is increased to 25$. It is not expensive; think of yourself as part of the process.” “What a strange reasoning to justify a price rise.” She bent to pick three bags out the basket while felt somebody at her back was looking at her. She turned back suddenly; a shadow ran and hid at the end of the aisle. She remembered the pickup truck parked at the entrance door. “The shadow person could be the owner of the blue pickup.” She took the bags and walked to the end of the aisle. Nothing was there but the ammonium smell of the silver bags. She went to the botanist; put the bags on the counter. He placed them into a plastic bag and said, “75 bucks.”
“Oh, I have forgotten to pick the ball of money off the floor of my apartment.”
“In that case, a new deal. I exchange the bags for something that you have.”
“What is that?”
“The piece of paper.”
“OK, if it is worth 75 dollars, I can draw many.”
“Not all at that moment. It is valuable.”
She gave her the paper, took the plastic bag, and left the store.
6
The Wild
The weather got colder; mist was gradually taking over the parking lot. She could hear the sound of the engine of the pickup car but could not see it through the mist. She thought the pickup managed to overcome the dirt mound and passed it. As she was walking across the parking lot raised her head to the sky, she could still see the shape of the moon through the mist, thick clouds were covering it.
The dirt mounds appeared to her as she was approaching the end of the parking lot, and something blue at the back. Getting closer, it was the roof of the pickup truck, the cabin. She got worried, looked back still the shop was lit, but continued her approach, slower. She started to talk to herself, “Don’t be afraid; remember what the psychoanalyst was telling you, you belong to the wild. The forgotten scenes come into light through the flashbulb of your fears. The frightful circumstance gives rise to a new association with the primitive one, though temporarily, ultimately the earliest always reassert themselves.”
“The running shadow behind the aisle, what if it is too much; the dread of an unknown is very different from the fear of an empty room when the one who closes the door is the one you can trust. My house, another empty room. Why am I so desperate to reach the lousy apartment again, passing through the long corridor of humiliation? Even the old man found his course of action. Who might ever want a smelly woman? I am not the ten-year-old girl; the poor little girl, still her heart is beating hard like a sparrow.”
She climbed up the mound, passed the low-level mist. The thick cloud in the sky was in an attempt to swallow the whole of the full moon, not successful yet. She stood with her bare feet on the top, looked at the end of the dirt road. The blue pickup with its cabin back door wide open was there and nobody around.
There it was the reality that you had anticipated but was hoping to evade, at last, was concrete and visible. She turned her body; still, the botanist was there. She could run toward the store, the entrance door would open; she would run to the end of the aisle, pass through