Quills and Frills-5/24/2014 Writing Prompt

Savory
by Ally Malinenko

Wet cardboard. Warm wet cardboard.

Think of wet cardboard – where it’s pulpy on top, a mushy consistency but the bottom is still firm and then leave the whole thing in the sun so that it’s baked warm to the touch.

That will give you some idea of what this is like when I actually put a slice of pizza in my mouth. The bigger problem is that it still smells just like pizza. Mouth-watering cheesy delicious pizza.

This is life without the sense of taste – the life I now live.

In the beginning I thought it was a just a cold.

I woke one day and the pancakes on my plate at the diner tasted – well... puffy. Only puffy. Like biting into a mouse-sized mattress. It was spongy and soft. Springy even. But there was no taste.

I put the fork down.

“What?” my girlfriend asked. She sat across from me both eating and thumbing through her phone.

“These don’t taste like anything.”

She rolled her eyes, speared a piece of pancake from my plate with her fork and popped it into her mouth. I watched the muscles of her jaw work.

“They taste like pancakes,” she said swallowing. “You’re probably getting a cold. Don’t be sick for Sunday’s thing. I know you don’t want to go but I promised Denise.”

I nodded, dipping a finger into the pool of syrup on the plate. I licked only cold mucus. Slime trailed down my throat.

Next was pasta. Noodles were worms. Spaghetti sauce has the same consistency as Elmer’s glue. Onion were slugs – hard on the outside and then a pop of warm mush inside. I gagged on those.

She ordered Chinese food. I got nothing from it but the slick acrid oil from the fry cooker. Vegetables gave me only something elemental – dirt and root, the birthing bed of life.

Every beverage was water. Coffee was hot water. Wine was cursed by some hypocritical bastard deity. Scotch on rocks was the first thing that gave me something – but that something was only the bitter tart left over of rubbing alcohol.

At first I panicked. I took swigs of hot sauce. My throat raged in fire but otherwise nothing. My tongue lay inside my mouth – a dead useless thing.

For the first few months I took over cooking. I over-salted, over-spiced everything. My girlfriend burst into tears at the dinner table while I raged in the kitchen.

When we made love, the sweet tang of her skin – the taste of her - was lost to me. I mourned that one most of all.

Eventually I stopped eating. Food had no meaning without taste. My weight dropped severely. My once toned body withered.

The doctor told me not to worry. He gave me brochures that told me taste usually returns. It would all be over in a year or two at the latest. A year or two? My stomach roiled. Was I supposed to live two years like this?
"Is it ever permanent?" I asked.
In answer, he pressed his pillowy lips together until they were nothing more than a white line.

Time passed. In small doses I sometimes found something. One time ginger popped in my mouth, barking attention from listless taste buds. I nearly died that day. It wasn’t much but it was something. Every forkful was another shot fired in this war. When I got something from food, it was a gift. I cursed myself for not appreciating it before.

“I think I got this,” my girlfriend said when I opened the door to our apartment. She stood over the range, enveloped in the aromatic wafting scent of something Indian. She looked stunning, her dark hair, her large eyes. I dropped my bag to the floor and wrapped my arms around her, nuzzling the nape of her neck. I pressed my lips to her skin and inhaled the scent of her. I wanted to tell her I loved her. To thank her for trying. To apologize for what our life had become but she’s too busy detailing the ingredients in the pan before her. I let my tongue just graze her skin. Give me something, please. Just the salt of her, I’ll take that even.  I close my eyes.

“I checked with the Doctor. He agreed that it was worth a shot. We’re going to wake that tongue of yours up, baby,” she said, adding another large dollop of yogurt sauce and curry to the mixture. “Don’t you worry about a thing.”

Nothing. Not even the salty flavor of her sweat. Her flesh was no different than the chicken she pushed around that pan. I tell her I won’t worry. I turn towards the spice rack and open the hot sauce. I shake some onto my tongue. I let it sit there like a pill I can’t swallow. And I pray to a god I’m starting to hate.


Untitled
by Joseph Bouthiette Jr.

This is how I learned to fall.

Maybe I’m losing weight, maybe I’m stumbling in a loss of my sense of weight. Or maybe I’m losing my sense of the ground. The ground, our perpendicular lover, but I’m growing more acquainted with her with every fall. Through her, the continents rumble and through me, the outpour of freshly opened scrapes. With each step I risk embracing her once more, my inner ears spinning like clouds in the wind. I close my eyes in that moment of uncertainty.

Shall I remain firmly rooted in place? Or shall I fall, a sheep to my gravity’s shepherd? Then I open my eyes, spine clattering against hard earth and eyes full of clouds. Through her, the dirt, I now embrace my true love, her, the sky.

This is how I learned to fly.

[Author's note: this is a remix of sorts of my prose poem "How I Learned to Fly" which can be read in its original form here. Stole a lot of lines from it that I liked for this piece on the loss of the sense of balance. Both are needlessly abstract and silly, but enjoy!]

Trampoline
By Aleathia Drehmer

Bonita was exceptionally clumsy.  Her mother had reminded her of this fact whenever she could and the opportunity arose often.  She used to tell Bonita that grace stopped by while she was sleeping and never bothered coming back.  It was not very surprising when Bonita awoke on the stretcher in the Emergency Room with her face bandaged.

The last thing she remembered was jumping on the trampoline with her friends.  She daringly did a back flip, feeling invincible as she bounced so high, and now she was here.  The ER was noisy—so many bells and whistles, so much chatter between patients and families, and medical banter of doctors.  Bonita looked around the room.  She could barely see over the bulky dressing across her nose.  There was a pain there like insipid fire, yet, she wasn’t really in pain.

Her mother sat there beside the bed with a look on her face that was equal parts irritation, “I hope you’re ok” and “I told you so”.  She said nothing to Bonita, so she said nothing back to her mother.  In their shared silence Bonita noticed she couldn’t smell anything.

It’s just the bandage, she told herself.

Well if it is just the bandage smarty then how come you can’t smell the gauze or the blood? She questioned.

She was very puzzled, but at 14 years old what did she know about noses and a person’s sense of smell?  All she knew was that her nose hurt and her face wasn’t too far behind it the longer she lay there in wonder.    Bonita counted the dots in the ceiling tiles while she waited in the swirl of noise around her. The doctor came into the room and told Bonita’s mother, not Bonita, that her nose was broken and there was nothing they could do about it.  She would have to see the specialist in a week.

Bonita cringed.  Specialist.  That meant a lot of money and she knew that her mother didn’t have the cash to pay for any of this.  She suddenly felt tiny inside as if she were a painfully heavy burden on her mother.  The doctor suddenly looked her in the eyes, standing over her smiling and chuckled.  “And you young lady are going to have a pair of black eyes.  Don’t blow your nose or there will be bleeding.”  Bonita nodded at the doctor and thought it was strange he thought this was all funny.  She did not mention her loss of smell.  She didn’t think it was permanent anyway.

The week passed and Bonita wore the purple badge across her face awkwardly.  Her friends made jokes and Bonita laughed as she always did when she hurt herself being clumsy, but inside she felt a darkness brewing.  Her food was tasteless and bland no matter how much salt or spice she used.  She could not smell the lilacs blooming beneath her bedroom window, or smell the early summer air with its sticky heaviness.  Bonita couldn’t even smell her brother’s horrid gym sneakers that he left closed up in the bathroom.  She was sort of glad of it, but at the same time it was a scent that told the story of her life.

The specialist told her she was fine when she mentioned she couldn’t smell properly.  He told her sometimes that happens with trauma, but he assured her it would come back.  Anosmia he said.  That was the real word for it.  He expected her to look impressed, but she struggled with the concept.  What will I do if I can’t ever smell again? She thought.

Many more weeks passed and Bonita became sullen.  She could smell nothing and the world slipped by her as if she were not even there.  She could not identify with the everyday workings of her own life.  It felt desolate and all her natural joy at being alive drained away into the grass she was standing on but could not smell.  Bonita thought of dying.  She dreamed of smelling the blood and the last threads of air in her lungs as they collapsed on themselves.  It would be so much better than this torture, she thought, seeing the world and not enjoying it.  She stood there in the yard a long time with this final ending.  Bonita smiled and put her arms out as if to be taken up into the heavens.

Bonita!!! God damn it, for the last time, dinner is ready!! Her mother shouted from the window.

Not this time, she thought, not this time.

( These stories were written from a single prompt.  What if you freakishly lost one of your senses, what would your life be like?)