I smell lilacs and thyme.

    I sit with my hands resting upon the wooden writing desk and try to take deep breaths, but I know that scent. I remember it like I remember my late mother’s face—a memory that surfaces always when I least expect it, a memory that makes me suck in my breath and blink more than I would like, but still, a memory that makes a bolt of anger shoot down my spine.

    They say scent memories are the strongest, that’s what the scientists say, and I believe them. I don’t know why I can smell her, but I can, and I can feel a wet spot of sweat spreading across my lower back like it does in interviews, except that I am alone, alone except for this overwhelming scent of lilacs and thyme.

    There’s no way she’s here. I watched her die. I watched her face grow pale as the blood poured out of her. I was there.

    I did it.

    I know she is gone.

    I know she’s gone because I listened the coroner proclaim her dead, I know she’s dead because even when I placed the check into his hands he only said, “She can’t press charges, so,” in order to justify it to himself, I suppose, but really, I know he wouldn’t have said that if she weren’t dead, I have to tell myself that.

    I know she’s dead and yet her scent surrounds me, drowning me as it did whenever she came into my presence, as it did when she leaned in—the first time—to press her red lips against my cheek—and I felt safe inside of that cloud of lilacs and thyme, at the time. But these things always change, and while I changed she did not, and this was too much for the both of us.

    And so I tried to shut her out of my life. I bought air freshener and starting wearing cologne and stopped picking up her calls and she never understood.

    She never understood much except how best to hurt me, I console myself, but even this thought is too much. I think of her face, her red lips, but I don’t need to imagine her smell because it’s here with me already.
    In the end she went too far, and so I finished it all, I finished it for the both of us and I would have thought she’d be pleased in her own way, at my anguish as that body remained where it was for six days and my house filled with the irrepressibly sweet stench of rot and lilacs and decay and thyme.

    I told my sister when I couldn’t stand it anymore and she gave me the check for the coroner and they took away the body and wiped away the blood and yet the smell remained, for weeks on end, no matter how much air freshener I bought and how much cologne I slathered on my neck, wrists, arms.
    And finally, just when I thought the smell had vanished for good, it returned.

    But it is different now. It is untainted. That awful after-taste of flesh gone bad has disappeared. It is nothing but lilacs and thyme and I am drowning in it, I am drowning, and though I have not moved a muscle, I can feel myself collapsing, collapsing, falling deeper into the overpowering odor of lilacs and thyme.