Floral Notes

His fingers trace the bend of the mug handle.  The ceramic is warm from the hot coffee inside.  Around him the fancy iron leg chairs scrape on the cobblestone patio periodically.  Scooters pass by on the narrow street with their feminine horns bleating now and then.  Samuel is suspended amongst these sounds, hanging in the ethers, everywhere and yet attached to nothing.  He sits in dormancy.

Early morning diners sit at the outside café.  Their conversations are low, the kind that suit a day just starting.  Forks clank on plates.  Waitresses ask gently, “Would you like a refill?” The sunlight is only now reaching this pocket of the city so the air is still chilled from being in the shadows all night.  The foot traffic on the sidewalks is picking up.  The city is coming to life.

Samuel is not thinking, exactly.  He sits just as he is, the totality of his life and experiences present in an ever-existing knowing but without a specific awareness or reflection on any of them.  To his right, the soft swish of skirts as a woman appears from the sidewalk behind him and now passes his table.  Her perfume reaches him a mere second after the sound of her movement.  Instantly Samuel is zeroed in on this moment and space in time, and an instant after that he is in 1997 and on the other side of the planet.

The scent was powdery.  Top notes of orange blossoms and bergamot, hints of ginger, held up by vanilla and sandalwood.  Floral and citrus.  The scent of a woman.  Then, in 1997, woman was a creature he was still getting to know.  He had looked down at her sleeping, her hair spread out around her small head in soft curls of golden-brown.  Her lashes were long and feathery with a touch of mascara.  Rosy cheeks.  Lips like a little bow.  Delicate features.  Virgin innocence.  Beautiful like a doe.

Samuel had not known if she was a virgin, not really.  Chances were not.  But like this it was easy to imagine.  Her perfume, it was what had made him look up from his book.  Not many people came into the little travel bookstore he was working at, and there was no bell on the door.  He knew the moment he saw her; this was something.  She moved so gracefully between the shelves like she was held by delicate strings from above.  Weightless.

The nervousness in her their first time made him think it had been her first time, and the way she had tensed up like it had hurt a little.  She had cried softly after and he had held her until she drifted off.  Now looking down at her like this he knew he wanted to keep her forever.

“Can I help you find something in particular?” he had asked her in the store.  “Samuel, by the way.”  He stepped around the counter.

“Maeve,” she said, touching one slight hand to her chest.  “Thank you.  I am not even sure it would be here.  It’s not exactly a travel book.”

“What’s it called?”

“Oh!”  She turned and opened her oversized satchel and reached inside.  She pulled out a small slip of paper.  “It’s about this journalist who was invited to visit the cannibalistic tribes in Haiti.  Here: The Divine Horsemen by Maria…”

“Maria Do Carmo Seren.”

She smiled.  “Yes! Do you have it?”

“You’re right, it’s not the typical travel book.  But we have a cultural studies section, and I believe I saw one copy.  It’s kind of a hard book to find.”

“I sort of randomly heard about it,” Maeve told him.  “I was talking to a sort of friend from this band about mythologies and how they show up the same in these really remote cultures…”

He walked to the back-corner shelf, half listening to her nervous words, half intoxicated by the smell of her and how that scent made her whole being appear like a song to him.  Appear like a song.  How interesting.  Running his finger over the spines of the books, he found Do Carmo Seren and slipped the white paperback from its place.  He handed it to her, and she pressed her palm to the cover, pleased.

He had not had the guts to ask for her number, but after she had paid and carried the book in its handled paper bag out the front door, he thought, What are you doing?!  Flipping the sign to read CLOSED he locked the storefront and went after her.

Now (then) in front of him, she stirred.  He stood beside her and gently placed his hand on her forehead.  Maeve opened her eyes and looked around a bit confused for a moment about where she was.  Then her eyes settled on him and became wide.  She pulled up and screamed.  Samuel pressed her head back down with his hand.

“Shh, shh, remember what we talked about.”

She stopped screaming, her doe eyes wide and filled with tears.  “Please, please, just let me go!  Why are you doing this?!”

He had said nothing, instead closing his own eyes and breathing in deeply.  Then he asked her, “What is that perfume?”

“What?”  Confused.

“What kind of perfume are you wearing?  It’s lovely.”

“You’re insane!  Let me go!”  She kicked with her feet and tried to raise her arms.  They were fastened to the table beneath her.

“Very well, then,” Samuel said, and pushed a white linen handkerchief into her screaming mouth.  He raised the remote control from the tray next to him and hit play on the stereo.  Replacing it, he picked up one of the blades that had lain beside it.

Maeve had not been his first, nor his last, but she was one of the special ones.  He lingers in the fond memory for another sweet moment, feeling the fullness of life.

Now here again was that powdery floral allure.  Samuel stands up from the table, and tucking a few bills under the mug, he follows.