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If Sadness Was a Smell, What would it be?
Send in your prompts!
Write a flash fiction piece based on a smell. Describe what your character feels by associating that with a certain scent. For instance if your character is sad maybe the smell associated with that would be the smell of rain on hot asphalt or grandma’s old rose scented potpourri. Use vivid words and adjectives to get your point across. The story should center on that smell. You want to be as descriptive as possible, so much that your reader can smell the smell too and, if you really pull this off, they’ll feel it too.
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1 Femme // Jan 29, 2008 at 2:54 am
The smell hit her as soon as she walked into the house. It curled into her nostrils like unwanted cigarette smoke, it was hot and pervasive and stopped her breath short. She paused in the living room, the dimness of four decades embracing her tightly. The smell quadrupled in the space of a few seconds. It was a bland, yet greasy aroma that spoke Christmas of Childhood Past quite fluently. She could imagine them now, the lobster tails, forever a family holiday tradition, broiling in the old oven in the kitchen, now being cooked by a strange woman her father had fallen in love with. She would soon have to sit at the dark pine dining room table, and accept the stranger as a mother figure. The lobster’s oily olfactory essence had now made its way down her throat to her stomach, where it churned and made her nauseous, as it always had as a child. She hated lobster. As a child, she always pictured the smell as an alien, silvery and ebony eyed, taking over her body and forcing her to enjoy Christmas. She never did, of course. But she had loved her mother, and the sadness which rose in her now, along with her gorge, forced her to run back outside to the dead front yard and vomit.
When she was done, she got in her car and drove away.
No more family holidays for her.
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