Cold Odor

By Molly Anne Blumhoefer

It was my second day in the city when we visited the veterans cemetery to find my dad. We ached from being too old to spend the night drinking, hugging, and flailing around your living room to eighties punk music. We slowly meandered through a maze of matching white stones that dotted the brown grass similarly to the patches of old snow. “Oh. Here he is,” I said, relieved. We had not eaten and I was running low. There was a stem of the purplest purple flowers on the ground in front of his stone that peculiarly absorbed me, as if I had never seen the color in my life, but remembered it somehow. At first glance they appeared to be for him, but then I realized that the wind had separated them from a nearby bouquet. And then I felt vacant and wondered if any of my siblings had also been there to do this thing that people do for themselves. I never understood it. I never planned on it, but had woken up with a want to visit him. Dream induced yearning must’ve fallen off the couch with me, and probably still drunk, I let it direct my morning.
“Well shit. Hey man. We miss ya,” you said as you touched the rock like you were his close friend, but you only drank with him a few times, unlike others who alongside he had consumed more than lifetimes. I was irritated by your attempt to connect to something that was not yours, but I couldn’t cry out at you. I couldn’t make my face work out any pain at all.
My head pounded a few times, the coming and going kind, and finally into a deep breath I admitted, “You want to leave now?”
We decided to get lunch in our old neighborhood, and parked in front of the duplex that we rented half of after high school. We stared at it for a few silent seconds and then aimlessly wandered past store fronts. We sat on a wet curb between parked cars on Nicollet Avenue to think. I was tempted to peel rust from a wheel well as I watched old dirty snow melt into the street. It drained past my black shoes and your black boots. It patched street scars made by street salt and I thought of my dad’s pockmarked face. It may have been the heavy hangover, but almost everything looked black and white.
There were many people, the color of ghosts, walking the sidewalks. They had eagerly abandoned their beanie hats, or wore them perched above their ears. It may have been a trend that year, but I remembered that I wore one like that as a teenager when the seasons started to change. It provided warmth, but also a way to hear others and to feel the whines of winter’s end, like fishermen listening for commands against spring winds. It was a little warmer than the days before and years past, but still cold enough to see breaths condense when looking closely at mouths. A lurking freeze bit at a thin line of exposed inked-skin, just above the edge of my black jeans, making my whole body colder. A low ashen cloud stretched over all sky and leaked a mood. The smell of a Vietnamese restaurant drifted past; we agreed that it might be good to eat there after a smoke. You pulled a single cigarette from the most colorful thing, an egg-blue box with an image of a man in headdress, American Spirits. You sparked it with a cheap white lighter. I instantly asked for a drag and apologized for my nerves. I was shaking from the cocktail of cold, sorrow, lingering alcohol, friendship, love. I was shaking from home.
I pulled off my black gloves and reached into the pocket of my short-cut black jacket to remove a folded piece of paper that I had just noticed was there. At the same time, a man in a gray charred coat walked between us and the moving cars. He must have lived in the homeless encampment that caught fire. I thought he was probably a veteran and I wondered which war. You watched him pass and then turned to me and asked if I was afraid to sleep outside when I was a runaway. I was surprised because you had never asked me anything about the streets, and we met in high school around the time I was still half-living like that.
“Oh man. That was decades ago,” I said. A chill entered my lower spine, where it connects to my pelvis, where the cold air had bit me a minute earlier. I moved closer to you, so that my shoulder was touching yours and anxiously continued, “Really I was only afraid to sleep in the winter, but not because I was afraid of freezing to death, but because of a chemical smell. It’s unnerving. All chemical smells are strange, but this is like bad nostalgia. I don’t think there’s a word for that kind of feeling. Like something happened to me in the winter and I blocked it out or something. But all the air smells like this in Minneapolis, but only when it’s night, a pitch-black night, like the ones without midnight colors, and it’s always cold, but not necessarily freezing, but it can be. It smells like burning plastic, or rubber, or meth, or maybe it’s an odor that comes with the weather, ozone or something. I couldn’t move at all because when I smelled it, it instantly made me have this thought that if something saw me, it would kill me. I barely slept, and...”
“Did you smell it last night when we walked to my house from the bar?” you interrupted.
All I could remember was my warm whiskey belly, feeling the patchwork of crunching old snow and soggy earth beneath us, the wind on my cheeks, hearing a melting creek that I couldn’t see, and you. You linked my arm to help me across the dark landscape. Everything about it quenched the bit of homesickness that I had left in me. I settled on an answer, “I didn’t notice any weird smells, but I wasn’t really paying attention. I bet it will be here tonight.”
You squinted at me inquisitively as you pulled the cigarette smoke deep inside of you. You took the paper that I had pulled from my jacket pocket off of my lap. I was relieved; I would have continued to think and talk about the cold odor. I would have asked myself so many questions and I would have asked you too. I would have tried to persuade you that you know about it. 
You unfolded the paper like the nature between us. It was a mess of scribbled notes. I realized that it was from when I was in town for my dad’s memorial the year before, like some kind of journal entry that never made it beyond that day, that pocket. I just about snatched it back from you, but I was curious too. I took a corner and moved it closer to my lap. We were as quiet as our lips quivering as we read:
I see it from the stone church. Mississippi flows under and around broken ice. like me. and
he is now just ashes. big skull. heavy ashes. I will say that in my tiny urn I have kept his
remaining leg. a joke like his. American flag at cemetery is so big I laugh. It nearly touches
blankets of fresh snow. and blankets of white stones. black spiky trees are trapped between
and sweep the sky into dusty clouds. I am trapped between. but loud pretty horns interrupt
and put me in a place. then even louder the same men shoot the air at nothing. dad used to
shoot the air at nothing. I am covered thick in his senselessness. ruined. just say goodbye
again. I say goodbye again as you pick up an empty shell for me. they left one behind and you
knew it was a gift. a better memory. you. goodbye.
later no one sees me when I start to cry. it is still daytime. and cry and cry. suddenly light is
no longer. but neither is heavy. even purple disappears and purple is this whole city. I leave
where I am hiding. I walk into outside. I cannot see anything in the moonlessness. I walk
outside inside the coldest air I’ve felt since I have walked outside. I walk into the freshest air
I can remember. then it is not as cold. I walk across the city into parts I can and cannot
remember. then it is nearly dawn and purple has recovered.
You dragged the cigarette deep inside again and looked into me intently, but not inquisitively, like you knew me better than me, maybe even the parts that died some winter night, like you knew about that smell.

****

Molly Anne Blumhoefer writes creative nonfiction, fiction, hybrid, and poetry. Her work has been published in Eclectica Magazine, LandLocked Magazine, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Red Wing Arts Artists Collaboration and more. Much of her work focuses on her relationship with her parents, both of whom served in the military, particularly her father who joined the army during the Vietnam War. Her writing embraces, implicitly and explicitly, direct and transgenerational traumas experienced within military families.