Vinegar and Madeleines

by J.E. Seuk

Ksenia Makagonova

Today the teacher taught her that smells are effective openers

of memory. Honeyed milk to mother’s touch, tang of vinegar twinging at her tricky elbow heaved into walls of penance for that broken bottle four years past.

It makes sense! She recently learned that while you’re asleep your nose can transport itself to other places, absorbing newer smells through newer faces — vacuuming up senses unknown to know. Now she wonders if

her grandmother’s umami-and-menthol perfume is actually my love memory and not hers? Perhaps her longing for spicy red sundubu stew bubbling next door is to avoid being beaten by his husband? Or will her overstuffed closet lead her through to Narnian cellar of invisibility, sharp mold, emeralds, and fear?

Or is it just noses?

Or if communal scents and remembrances of traveling noses are the answers to

you versus me, they, and so (I guess I’m glad for the very first time of my much despised larger nose) we wonder on, together, we breathe and sniff, recall and know.

---

J.E. Seuk is a 1.75 generation Korean American immigrant living in England. A former high school English teacher, she’s now pursuing an MSt in Creative Writing at the University of Cambridge. J.E. has had poetry and prose in Kissing Dynamite (as featured poet), Caustic Frolic, Ellipsis Zine, and elsewhere; she was nominated for Best of the Net and commended for the FAB Prize. After aggressive cancer treatment, she’s picking up her pen again. Find her @SeukWrites.