Ascent
He pours me into the copper perfume bottle. A dropped pearl of me trembles on the bottle’s lip, before sliding in. He stoppers the bottle; I am in darkness. I slosh as the bottle is carried elsewhere. Low chanting, muffled. Someone unstoppers me. That pearl that so recently rejoined me slips out, away. That pearl of me joins instead with the air and smoke, rises up to Hathor, Anubis, Osiris, Isis. That pearl is with the gods.
*
Many bottles later, I hang in a glass flask from a necklace, clutched in a sweaty palm. Again, low chanting, frantic this time, a constant thrumming murmur punctured only by the bright dry click of rosary beads. A candle sizzles as its lit wick dies out. More drops of me leave the flask, our edges merging with pale wrists, a thin neck. But there’s only so much I can do. I’m a scent, not a saviour. My wearer dies of plague anyway.
*
I am a pool quarter-filling a porcelain vessel shaped like a dove. My new owner traces her pointed fingernail over the inscription at the base: He who neglects me loses me. She says in a low purr, ‘An old lover gave this to me.’ She eyes her new lover in the mirror of her baroque vanity as he lounges on her bed, loosening his cravat. She unstoppers me. I rise on transparent wings, onto her powdered skin, then from her skin to his. He murmurs something about intoxication and love. She laughs in throaty victory.
*
I sit, just dregs, in a brown glass bottle. A semicircle of other brown bottles surround me, an obedient choir awaiting their conductor’s nod. After my zigzag adventures, this last leg, this final journey home, is terribly orderly. Once a sacrament, nearly a saviour, then a séducteur, now a science. The parfumier sits in front of us—his brown-bottle perfume organ—turning the last few bottles so our labels face out. He is going to figure me out. What am I made of? How can I be classified? How am I structured, how are my chords built? Which are my high notes, the first impression made on the nose? Which my middle notes, lingering later?
He cannot know that tomorrow a rat will scamper across this table and knock me into the hard floor. My bottle will perfectly smash and I will escape, seeping joyfully between interlocking chevrons of wood panelling to find the good dark earth below, to slowly, slowly, sink in and finally be reborn in the unctuous rising sap of a rose. Poor man; he could not have figured me out anyway. Like all humans, he is stoppered by death. He could never discover, let alone understand, that my base note is time, and such a base note fixes all other notes and does nothing but stay, and stay, and stay.
Feby Idrus, a Dunedin-based writer, has been previously published in the journals Carmina Magazine and Midnight Echo, and in the anthologies A Clear Dawn (Auckland University Press) and Otherhood (Massey University Press). When not writing, she’s busy working for orchestras and teaching flute. Find her on X and Instagram @febyidrus.