What Is Missing
2 Minutes Read Time
Web and Media Editor Bess Winter Kosinec: In the grand tradition of Modernist fiction, British upstairs-downstairs dramas or the single-shot wonder Russian Ark, Cheryl Pappas’s bite of story offers the reader a journey downward and inward on the back of a scent.
Listen to Cheryl Pappas read “What Is Missing”:
What Is Missing
Her perfumed, plaited hair shone bright under the dizzying ballroom light, as brassy as the trumpets swinging on the enormous stage, and its lavender scent raced through the crowd, in and out of the arms of dancing couples, and into the poor man’s black cracked leather bag, which, as soon as the scent lay like a feather onto his waiting cloth inside, he clasped tight, oh the way the poor man hunched and dipped out of the crowd, dressed inconspicuously in all black, the way he returned to the dingy alley behind the doctor’s secret offices, and where the little man climbed the back stairs to the small room where the woman lay on a makeshift mattress while the knife plunged into her to remove her unwanted child, the way the poor little man rushed to kneel by the woman’s side and opened his bag to proffer her the most delicious perfume, which, if she survived, she’d keep the memory of and not of the screaming, and if she did not, she would carry with her to heaven the scent of royalty, of which she could, finally, not be denied.
