It’s been almost a year now since she started taking in the scent of printed numbers.

When people inquire as to how this attraction developed, she relays to them the strained, shaking recollections of a burning orange morning where the passing, drooping brick buildings outside her bus window wail from the agonizing headaches of stomping feet, and the shattering of soap-drenched dishes.

She was holding her daughter’s homework assignment. Ribbons of light coiling around the language of algebra, smudged shadows of graphite stretching towards the wrinkled corners, bowing at the faint traces of chocolate fingerprints from the hand of a 13-year old who had been dwelling in her locked bedroom for the past three days for pushing a fellow classmate down a flight of stairs.

Suddenly, as she focused on a hastily scribbled five, her nostrils began to twitch. Closing her eyes she could see herself from the numeral’s perspective, a woman whose cavernous, sagging face welcomed the strangely fragrant swirl of freshly cut floating grass.

With each stop and fading street came new numbers and scents.

Four evoking the smell of crushed blueberries on a wooden countertop, twelve of washed linen and eight of wet sand.

Her favorite, though, was six. Within it, she found herself under her mother’s bed, dust and bits of summer soil hiding from the encroaching rays of the sun, as her mother’s legs stood in front of the window, the breathing invisible limbs of begonias crawling up the back of her yellow dress and making their way to the dangling silver earrings swaying gently in the breeze of her absent father’s whispered breath.

She keeps a journal now, spending the majority of her Sunday afternoons seated at her kitchen table, staring into the empty, darkened void that used to be her daughter’s room, writing down endless numerical variations and holding them close to her face, hoping to one day again find herself enveloped in the lush, rising chocolate of her daughter’s laughter.

 

Matthew Vasiliauskas is a graduate of Columbia College Chicago, where he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Film and Video Production. In 2009, he was awarded the Silver Dome Prize by the Illinois Broadcast Association for best public affairs program as producer of the Dean Richards Show at WGN Radio. He is a frequent contributor to Film Monthly, an online journal of contemporary cinema. Matthew currently lives and works in Los Angeles. You can view more of his writings at thepapersnake.com

Photo by Cameron Russell