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?)
