The Smell of Grief

The flat smelled like dust and endings.

Three weeks since the funeral, and I still hadn't opened the windows. Couldn't, really. The frames were painted shut, had been for years, and Dad never got around to fixing them. He never got around to fixing anything. The kitchen tap dripped. The hall light flickered. The front door stuck unless you shouldered it just right.

I knew the exact pressure needed. I'd grown up shouldering that door.

The boxes were the worst part. Not because there were so many, though there were, stacked floor to ceiling in the spare room, crammed under the bed, piled on every surface. The worst part was what was in them. Newspapers from 1987. A clock with no hands. Receipts for things I couldn't identify. Three broken radios. A shoe, singular, men's size nine, no mate.

My father's life, reduced to things nobody wanted.

I pulled another box from the wardrobe shelf. Heavy. The cardboard damp at the corners, softened by years of neglect. Inside: a tangle of extension cords, a chipped mug with "World's Best" printed on it (the rest had worn away), and at the bottom, wrapped in a handkerchief, something small and round.

A coin. Or not a coin. The wrong weight for a coin, the wrong warmth. It sat in my palm like a living thing, heavy and humming, inscribed with marks I couldn't read. Not any language I recognized, and I worked in a library. I'd seen most of them.

I turned it over. The marks on the back were different from the front. Deeper. They caught the light wrong, like they were carved from the inside.

I pocketed it. Added it to the mental list of Dad's inexplicable possessions, somewhere between "box of keys that fit no locks" and "fourteen identical blue notebooks, all blank."

By nine o'clock I'd filled six bin bags and barely made a dent. The flat still smelled like him. Wool and old paper and something underneath that, something I couldn't scrub out. Not rot. Not mould. Just absence. The specific scent of a space where someone used to be and isn't anymore.

I poured cheap wine into the chipped mug because I'd packed all the glasses and sat in his armchair. The springs groaned. The cushion held the shape of him still, a hollow I didn't quite fit.

The wine was terrible. I drank it anyway.

"I wish this place didn't smell like death."

I said it to nobody. To the stained ceiling. To the dripping tap marking seconds in the kitchen.

The air shifted.

Not a breeze. Not a draft from the painted-shut windows. Something else. The temperature in the room ticked up by one degree, then two. The dust motes suspended in the lamplight went still, perfectly still, as if the air itself had stopped breathing.

Then a voice from the kitchen doorway.

"Done."

I dropped the mug. Wine spread across the carpet in a dark stain.

A man stood in the kitchen. Tall, sharp, pale in a way that made the lamplight look dirty. He was watching me with eyes that were the wrong color, amber-gold, catching light from a source I couldn't identify.

He tilted his head. The movement was precise. Not human-precise. Something else.

"Though the smell was grief, not death," he said. "I removed what I could."