Smells

She smelled it as soon as she entered the room, the door kicking one last waft of good air past her before closing her off from it for good. The people already in the room didn’t seem to notice. How could they not notice? It was not an overpowering smell. It was not like onions or mint; it did not fill the room down to each tiny crevice and crack and pore. But it was there all the same, along with other smells, garlic and leather and puffs of sulfur from tiny candles. It followed in the wake of waitresses, smartly dressed in white and black. It was drawn upwards at the behest of one steadily spinning ceiling fan and pushed down by another. It crept over everything, leaving nothing untouched.

“We should eat somewhere else,” she muttered, mostly to herself as she knew what he would say.

“We’re already here.”

“Don’t you smell that burning?”

“So they dropped something on a burner.”

She stopped trying. That was it, then. Everyone here did smell it, they just didn’t know. Unsurprising, really. How many here had ever burned themselves before? Really done so, not just on a stove or on a match but on a hot metal slide left baking in the August sun for hours until a smiling six year old girl climbed up and tossed herself down and felt her thighs fuse to the glinting silver and heard the sound of Sunday breakfast and smelled…oh!

And here was that smell, certainly coming from the kitchen. Her grip tightened on her clutch purse. A waitress with a swift gait and nothing in her hands slid by. There, on the sleeve of her crisp white button-down shirt smartly accessorized with a black tie and a red kerchief. There, there was a red stain. Wine, sauce, cranberry juice, it could have been anything, they were in a restaurant for God’s sake. But it wasn’t. She knew it like she knew that smell.

“Come on, our table’s ready.”

“We should really go.”

“No, we’re here already and I want the special.”

She choked on a groaning laugh and let herself be lead to the far corner.