Death Scent
By Kemal Onor
My strongest childhood memory is the way people smell right before they die. It’s granular, like heavy chunks of sand and salt scraped against your senses, filth, and grim. That smell is all gritty, dirt in the teeth. The taste of flaking skin peeling like so much withered and dried paper. Fingernails bent backwards like sun-soaked leaves. Memories leaking from radio receiver ears. Ears that detect faint mutterings of breathing, like a microphone scanning the darkness. The mind becoming a burned forest of ancient timber. Nothing more can grow; nothing can inhabit the blackened space that once held a fully functioning brain. That was how I remembered people to smell right before they die. It’s dusty, like meat that has molded. Bones that have burned, left to rot in sun and heat.
I never had a great connection with my father. Maybe it was the fact that he never seemed happy, or that he never cared for calisthenics or vegetables. I was nearly thirty by the time his mind began to fill with water, or more likely beer. Either way, my brothers and I had started talking about what was to be done with him. Who was going to take care of him, now that it was growing apparent that he would not be able to care for himself? I had disappeared from our hometown like a seed tossed to the wind across the country. By a meager distance of two thousand and thirty miles, I was the farthest away from my nearest relative. I received a phone call from the youngest of us. That was the first time I had our father’s body described to me. He had become a deranged balloon animal, all atrophied limbs, but swelling belly. He was a scarecrow with an overstuffed midsection. The crows having pulled at his arms and legs, tearing stuffing with their hooked beaks.
“He looks like he’s getting pregnant,” said my brother over the phone. Mike and I never talked much; we were just too busy. He was married with a couple of kids, and I was still chasing a dream of writing. It was strange hearing from him, hearing the way he talked about our father, like he was entering the final trimester, before giving birth. I was the oldest, so naturally my phone continued to ring over the next few weeks. I had never talked so much with my family. I suppose, misery loves company. Here was the most miserable man any of us could come up with, bringing the family together again.
It was suggested that we should all meet up. The phone calls had become long. We agreed to get together at the end of the month. We would be able to strategize in person what we were going to do with him. I was apprehensive about seeing everyone, but I told them I would be there. I put off buying the plane ticket until the last moment. Secretly, I was hoping the old guy would just die in his sleep, and we could forget the whole matter. I thought back to how much I had hated that small town where we grew up. I thought back on how much I had wanted to leave. I wondered if the town would still be frozen in time, like a kid’s room after a funeral.
I boarded the plane and prepared for the half hour flight back home. John would meet me at the airport. It was about another half hour drive to get home. The joy of small towns, you have to go out of your way to get anywhere.
I closed my eyes, sitting on the plane, my stomach restless like I had eaten a bad hamburger. It festered in my gut. It had been twelve years since I had thought to come home. Ever since mother passed, there was no reason for me to come back. The town held too many ghosts in my mind. It would be like walking through a graveyard on the edge of Halloween. Seeing flashes of white creeping out of the graves. Seeing boney fingers clawing at the brown earth, rising up on long leg bones. Peering, with empty eyes, jittering with empty mouths, clicking teeth in a beetle scurry on stone.
My stomach dropped as the pilot came over the radio saying we would be beginning our descent. As we circled the runway, I sat helpless to the feeling of dropping. I felt a cold chill rising through my feet, passing like a shock of electricity up my spine. I always hated flying. The feeling of being helpless to the pull of gravity. I realized my hands had made tight fists. The plane touched down, and I was certain I had been dropped into a tomb.
The engines roared then slowly died as we came to the ground. We were taxied and let off the plane. I made my way to the baggage claim and stood waiting to see if John would be nearby.
“Zack,” said a voice. I turned and saw John making his way towards me. John was the closest in age to me, the middle child. His face was red like it always was. He constantly looked winded like he had just been chased up a fire escape. He was the closest, perhaps to our father in build and demeanor. His face was round like a pie.
“How’ve you been?” I asked, making idle conversation.
“Busy as ever,” said John.
“Have you talked to Mike? I asked.
“Yea.”
“You know I don’t have much of a relationship with dad.”
“Of course. But he’s still our dad.” I was already regretting having agreed to come out here. We could have just as easily had this stilted conversation over a phone call, but it was too late. I had already agreed, and everyone else looked ready to get together. We left the airport and got into John’s car. I put my stuff in the backseat and climbed in. There were wrappers, empty chip bags, and some beer cans cluttering the passenger side footwell. I sat with my feet ankle deep in John’s garbage. He got in without so much as a word about it and turned on the engine.
The car came to life, and we started to move away from the airport.
“It’s been a while, hasn’t it?” said John, after we had been on the road for ten minutes.
“Twelve years,” I said. I let my vision naturally fall out the window and into the distance. There really wasn’t much of interest. On either side of the road was open land. I could feel my mind approaching a house of memories. It stood on tiptoe, looking into a lit room. My mind was swimming in absent thought, wadding through heavy, viscous memory. Things long dormant from my child mind. Already there was too much familiarity. “Anything different?”
“Not really. Things just get older,” said John. He gave a smile as though he had just told a joke. Maybe he had, I couldn’t be certain. “Look in the glovebox,” he instructed. I looked inside and out dropped a number of neatly folded pamphlets. I took one from the cluttered floor and looked at the cover page. A colorful picture of a large building with green lawns and everlasting sunlight shown over the page. A group of senior citizens had their heads thrown back, faces crinkled with laughter.
“A nursing home?” I said, looking over the pages of text and pictures of facilities with nurses, comfy chairs, and aerobic exercises.
“It’s a possibility,” said John. The tension grabbed his jaw and he kept his eyes straight ahead.
“You remember what happened?”
For the next few minutes, we were both silent. We had become dolls with our mouths being a zigzag of thread, unable to open. The world outside drifted by, and I felt that silence like a sword to my gut. Like it had cut me, and I was stifled in John’s passenger seat. There was no urgency to the speed he drove. We stewed in that silence, slowly being buried in a heavy dose of uncertainty.
We suffered in that stark, noiseless car until the road started to slope and angle its way down. The edge of town came as the green, open space closed down. Things moved closer to the road. The wild wheat fell away, and buildings could be made out in the distance.
“Does Mike know?” I asked, straining my voice.
“Of course. You’re the one who moved away.” He smiled like he had told another joke. This time I knew he had. John slowed the car down to a crawl. The streets were narrow, and here and there a handful of people could be seen going about their business in the afternoon. John turned the wheel, and we moved onto another street. He pulled into a parking spot. We both got out. There was nothing ceremonious about my return home. Not that I was expecting any kind of welcome to a place I had been so eager to escape. I thought about what John had said, about things not really changing, just getting older. I gave a weak smile at the idea.
Together, John and I entered a café. It had been the only place in town to get a good breakfast. The place had the ascetics of an old-time saloon. Big, black metal, abomination letters stuck out over the entrance way. Still as garish from my memory as they were now. It read Eggs n’ Break. We quickly found Mike sitting alone at a table. He had a large cup of coffee in front of him, and a small plate, that had the crumbs of what looked to be his breakfast. The tension from the drive was still there, seated at the table like a stone statue with an angry brow. Something surveying with disapproval. I worried I was going to be overruled. I had no idea how much Mike and John had already spoken with each other without a phone.
I realized that I was still holding the pamphlet from the glovebox.
“Can we talk about this?” I said. I dropped the pamphlet on the table. Mike looked at it with little interest. He sipped from his coffee.
“Do you want a coffee, tea?” said Mike.
“I didn’t come here for breakfast,” I said. I tried to keep the edge from my voice, but I was irritated of always being the one left out of everything. Maybe it was my fault for moving so far away, or for the month when I had the phone disconnected. For the year that I refused to live anywhere that had a mailbox. It had been Isolation in the name of creation. John got up from the table and went to get himself a cup of coffee. Mike and I were left alone.
“How’ve you been?” asked Mike. He sat up in his seat, pushing his coffee cup away from him, before placing it on the plate.
“What are we going to do about dad?” I said. I mirrored Mike’s posture and put my hands on the table. The pamphlet still lay between us, like a landmine waiting to be tripped.
“We know it was hard on you. You were the oldest. But try and settle down.” I swallowed my desire to stand up and shout at him like I used to, back when we were all kids. John returned to the table with a paper coffee cup. It was full, and he had neglected to put a lid on it.
“If we pool our money,” said John. “We can get dad a nice place. One better than the one mom went to.” He sat down with a heavy groan. The landmine had been tripped.
“I’m not pooling money,” I said. My blood felt like gasoline that had just been ignited. Hot, fierce, like it was when we were children. They would never understand. I pushed back from the table, like I was already done with the conversation. I gripped the back of my chair and peered at my brothers.
“Let’s take a ride,” I said. I pushed my chair back into the table. Mike and John moved slowly, like I had suddenly turned into a dinosaur, or something timid, a fox, or a bear. They studied me as they stood. We all got into John’s car.
“Let’s go visit mom,” I said. The whisper of a sinister grin at the edge of my lips. “Then we can see dad. Get this whole thing settled.”
Now we were ghost hunting in broad daylight. My brothers exchanged nervous glances at one another. John moved us slowly from the street, and we made our way about a half mile or so from the center of town. We passed through a granite archway. A stone statue of a cloaked woman bent her head and looked down at us. There was suspicion in that frozen stone stare.
“Zack,” said Mike. He put a hand on my shoulder. The three of us got out of the vehicle. From there it was a gradual incline along neatly cured green grass and rows of headstones. I was going to have them look at what had been done to our mother. They were going to understand that when she was sent her to the nursing home, crying about loneliness, and demons standing in her room watching her sleep, tracing her eyelids with their long fingernails. That we should have listened to her threats. We should have kept her from that place. I had been an aide at the time, volunteering to work with the elderly. I found our mother at the bottom of a flight of stairs. She had let herself fall backwards. She must have stood at the top, and just let go of the railings, then slowly leaned her head back until gravity took her. I had kept this secret ever since I was seventeen.
We made it through the rows, walking like muted things. Shadows, starlight, a deep emptiness settled over us. It took us and wrapped us tightly together like we were toys being packed safely into the bottom of a chest to be forgotten in the attic. Then we stood at the grave. There was no wind, but a chill punctured my chest.
“I have to tell you guys something,” I began. As I told them, I felt the chill spread to my shoulders, to my lungs. The cold touch of ice crept through my body, and I worried I was not going to be able to get through telling them what had happened all those years ago. It took me over ten minutes to explain what I had kept hidden. Some things came easier than others. It took me a while to explain that I had carried mom and put her back in her bed. That I had been the one to close her eyes and tuck her in that final time.
“We can’t do that to dad,” I said. I wiped a hand across my face.
“Liar,” said John. “Mom had memory issues towards the end. She didn’t kill herself.” He paused as if thinking what to say next, or perhaps waiting for me to react.
“If we can get dad to stop drinking so much, he might be able to stay where he is. Jen and I can check in on him,” said Mike. I had narrowed my vision and was staring at John.
“You’ll do what you think is right!” I said. There was no denying the edge to my voice.
“You left!” said John, firing back. In an instant we were all children again, angry at one another for something the other did. But this was bigger than kid stuff. We were at complete odds with one another. I would be damned if I let them do what happened to mom happen again. I would not be there this time to cradle the head, clean the blood that pooled at the bottom step. I would not be there this time to make it look peaceful.
My muscles tightened like ropes being pulled taught. My blood boiled, but I managed a calm breath. I took a long blink.
“I have an idea,” I started calm and collected. “We could see what Dad wants.” John’s face slackened, and he nodded.
“Mom never did want to go to the nursing home,” said John. We had narrowly avoided a full-blown argument. I guess memories and ghosts have a traumatic effect on you no matter how old you are. I took a final look at our mother’s gravestone before turning to make our way down the hill to the car.
We settled back into our silent unease and went off to see our father. I had a plan in my mind to make sure dad did not suffer the same fate of our mother. A small knife I kept in my pocket. It was something I was okay keeping secret for now. My childhood home came into view. It had been so strongly burned into my memory that I was well prepared to see the white siding, the black roof that looked like so much black mold. I thought back to what John had said, things don’t change, they just get older. Nothing could be truer about this place.
It was well into the afternoon as we arrived at the home of our father. It reflected like a postcard stuck in time.
The front lawn was mostly dried mud from last year’s thaw. Drowned grass and dark patches of lifeless roots.
“You’re spending the night, right?” said John, pulling into the driveway.
“Yea,” I said. I wanted to keep any hint of suspicion out of my voice. We took my luggage to the steps. I stood a moment, pausing. I was not sure if I was really ready to see my father. I knew I would have to face him sooner or later. We got everything inside, and I was given a bed in the living room. The whole place had the smell of stale beer. Like the house had no ventilation. It was hot and stuffy. My father did not so much as greet us.
“He knows I’m in town, right?” I said.
“He does. He just might of forgot,” said Mike.
“Hello,” said John. His voice echoed through the house. “Dad, are you here?” The three of us started calling out and walking about the place like we were children scouring a graveyard with flashlights. Our hands shaky, afraid of what we might come across in some shallow grave. We found him in one of the backrooms, asleep with a beer still in his hand. The description Mike had given me had not prepared me for how deformed my father had become. And, there was a strange smell I detected in the air, like heavy chunks of salt and sand. That smell was all gritty, dirt in the teeth.
Kemal Onor is a neurodivergent author. He has an MFA in Creative writing from the Solstice MFA in Creative Writing Program at Pine Manor College. His work has been featured in Tales from the Moonlit Path, The Dark Void, The Creepy Podcast, and more. He has twice received the JSC/VSC Fellowship award. He lives in Michigan.
