tell me about it

As I leaned on the table and rested my cheek on my hand I caught a whiff of a pleasant scent. Where did it come from? I turned my head - was it? - it was! The scent emanated from my own hands. I dabbed my nose against the thin pale skin of my wrist and inhaled. The smell was light, floral, unfamiliar. I couldn’t connect it with myself; it didn’t smell like anything I recognized. Ah, yes. The toilet soap I’d used to wash my hands with. I breathed in again. It was faintly alien, to sniff my own hands and not recognize my own smell. For a second it felt like another person’s hands were attached to my arms - it was such a peculiar feeling.

I began to imagine what this person would be like. An older woman, most likely, going by the bouquet. Widowed - or perhaps, more likely, her husband had left her. Hair liberally streaked with gray, I thought, and an empty apartment yawning beneath her feet. She’d sit by the dresser in the mornings and examine her wrinkles in the mirror, dab toilet water on her pulse points. A useless exercise, since no one would scent it but herself. I nodded to myself. This arm belonged to her. It couldn’t possibly be mine.

I ran my lips gently across the wrist. It was soft and satiny, the fragrance drifting into my head. I hadn’t ever noticed before how delicate the skin there was. Then I recalled how it looked to have beads of blood swelling and ripening in a thin red line, bright red against the white of the wrist. Yes, it was fragile. Thin. Easily torn.

Again I stared at the forearm as if it belonged to someone else. I convinced myself that I could no longer feel it attached to my body. It was foreign to me. If I twitched a muscle, would the fingers really move? I imagined straining, stretching, while the hand stayed stiff and immobile and uncaring of my demands. Experimentally I contracted a muscle in the arm. I held my breath. The index finger moved - I felt vaguely disappointed. I decided that despite the strange scent my arm did belong to me after all. I smelt my wrist. I felt the puffs of air as I exhaled on my skin. It was my own hand.