Senses
By Patricia Morris
HOME sounds like silence, broken by a refrigerator hum, cackling chickens from next door, the occasional helicopter or small plane buzzing overhead. Home sounds like music sometimes. This afternoon it was Dave Mason, a live album from 1976 that my boyfriend and I listened to on lazy afternoons while smoking joints. Since I live by myself these days, at the end of a dead-end street, with double-paned windows, I do spend a lot of time in utter silence.
FEAR smells like sulphur, a match struck and then extinguished. Fear smells like an ice cold snowy morning, sharp and clarifying. Fear smells like aluminum. Like dead fish in a swimming pool, belly up. Fear smells like a sweaty wrestling mat, like ammonia, like skunk spray drifting into my bedroom window and making my eyes burn in the middle of the night.
DANGER tastes like moldy bread. Like a stiff shot of whiskey. Danger tastes like Pop Tarts; French fries; sometimes like a sheet pan birthday cake from Safeway, the way its sickly sweetness lures you in. Danger definitely tastes like Trader Joe’s Garlic Butter Irish Potato Chips, so addictive you eat a whole bag when you only intended to have “a couple.”
SAFETY feels like a down comforter, like a long, warm hug from my brother. My brother is the best hugger I know, which never fails to surprise me. Safety feels like going somewhere (voluntarily) with a firefighter or a [trusted] police officer – people who are trained to respond in an emergency. Safety feels like a warm, dry home when it’s raining outside, a warm coat, a warm meal.
SECURITY looks like yellow caution tape establishing a boundary. Security looks like money in the bank, like a doctor’s after-visit summary with no adverse findings. Security is a mirage.
Patricia Morris enjoys her silence and writing about everyday life in Petaluma, California.
Her writing has appeared in Rand McNally’s Vacation America, the Ultimate Road Atlas and The Write Spot anthologies Possibilities and Musings and Ravings From a Pandemic Year, edited by Marlene Cullen.
She loves road trips, the Grateful Dead, and Dogen.