If Only in His Nose
by Brett Stuckel
I asked the clerk at the smell store for the Vanillaroma rearview yellow-tree sunbaked-dashboard velvet-cloth light-and-sweet coffee aroma of Kenny Serafini’s Dodge Daytona on the way to high school at seven a.m. on a black-ice morning. The clerk found the smell after a quest through the shelves in back, and I unscrewed the yellow lid of the glass jar and whiffed, right there, not because I had not played my saxophone in years, and not because I’d heard Kenny had made a living from his bass guitar that rode with us slotted between the two front seats and bisecting the back seat where I had sat beside my best friend, Kenny’s little brother, who sat behind Kenny’s best friend, my older brother, and none of us had died in Kenny Serafini’s Dodge Daytona, though that would have made sense given the front-wheel-drive power underfoot, the haze in the car, the unsecured bass guitar in a hardshell case ready to clock a temple. My brother died years after I’d logged the last smell to associate with him, us in a Kuala Lumpur taxi toward my flight home. He must have worn a fine suit the morning he died. Black ice was not a factor. Did he have a Dunkin Donuts coffee? But even if he didn’t, I like to think there was at least one morning among his thousands on the road when the sugar and cream of a paper-cup coffee mixed with his clove smoke and the cabbie’s aftershave and for a moment brought us together.
Brett Stuckel’s debut poetry collection is Neurocabin (Spuyten Duyvil, Dec. 2025). His work has appeared in Hobart, XRAY, Split Lip Magazine, and elsewhere. He's online at www.brettstuckel.com and offline in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
