Christian Dawn // D11 // FIN

christian dawn
male
fourteen
district eleven

It is morning, and in the orchards, a boy is gathering fallen fruit. His white-blonde hair falls in layered sheets across the tips of his slightly pointed ears as he bends down to run short, agile fingers through the grass. He breathes in the scent of over-ripe plums which have already stained the knees of his long-faded jeans. The corners of his lips, topped by the fine hairs of a boy who needs his first shave, and pale as the rest of his skin an anomaly in a sun-burnt city twitch upwards, but the smile doesn’t reach his eyes. These stay dead, emotionless, with their small pupils bleeding saturated blue into the pooling irises around them. He glances behind him to check that his family aren’t looking for him yet, and pockets what he has just picked up. Then the boy stands to his full height, which compared to his father isn’t much, hunches his narrow, sloping shoulders and hastily scampers forwards to begin his search again. The only suggestion that this activity has been going on for a while is the pairs of patches of flattened grass from his small boots by the base of every tree in the row.

Afternoon, and this little forager is in his room again, admiring his collection. The boots lie discarded by his door, which is firmly shut as a mark of his preference for seclusion while he goes about this task. The pile of swelling plums oozes onto his sheets, but he doesn’t mind. If his mother asks, it’s blood from a splinter. His wide palms are stained enough by the juice for that story to be believable. Tentatively, he raises one hand to his little ferrety nose and sniffs. Now concentrated, the scent is overwhelming, and the boy falls back beside his pile with joy. This is his domain. Suddenly, he hears the burble of voices through his floorboards. They’re back, and his time is up. Sitting up abruptly, the plums rolling into the pit made by his weight and knocking against his prominent hip bone, just visible above the waistband of his jeans, he reaches between his legs, under the bed, and pulls out a large wicker basket. Secret. Into it he pushes his treasures, not caring about the mess, and watches as they roll amongst the other parts of his collection. Spices in their pots, bought at market, scented paper out of his father’s study, old morsels of cheese and garlic from dinners long passed, an archive of his obsession through the media of smell.

If you asked him directly for that’s the only way you’d make him confess to his hobby, Christian wouldn’t be able to tell you quite when he realised that his future was in the olfactory realm. His father, his grandfather and his great-uncle had all owned orchards, trading in taste and sight and touch. His cousin is a musician, mastering three instruments before his fourteenth birthday. Christian himself could play the fiddle elegantly, but it never interested him. He only kept it up because holding the freshly polished instrument under his chin allowed him to breathe in its own symphony of aromas, instead. For a long time, his job was scampering down rows of trees with a stepladder to check the strength of branches, the dampness of soil, the size of fruits. It was a routine, and kept him out of trouble, so he obliged without protest. He always chose his battles carefully. Soon, as he grew and his senses developed, a silver lining to what was once a chore began to emerge. Before starting his work for the day, Christian would stop at the first row of trees, close his eyes and breathe. Without seeing, it seemed as if his sense of smell was intensified tenfold. He scrunched his dark eyebrows together, tiny creases forming, and tried to pick out the different chords. From the house, the wafting fragrance of freshly baked pies his mother’s speciality, and something he had always run back to eagerly after a long day between the trees, and beyond that the heady exhaust fumes from his grandfather’s truck. Around him, a mixture of peaty earth and manure, and ahead, the rich smell of the components of the orchard. With an analytical mind like Christian’, he quickly categorised his library into pleasant smells, or smells to avoid, or smells with implications of a person or an object, or smells which he assumed were specific to that time of year. But he was also forwardthinking, knowing that it would take more than just one season of harvesting smells to make his collection substantial.

What mattered most at that point was finding some way of making his discoveries permanent. Christian had never had the quickest memory, although his recall was fairly good. He tried to do what his mother did when she made jams, preserving samples of mud or flowers in jars. But, too soon, a frustrated Christian found that the flowers were dead, their scents dissipated, and the mud was now host to a colony of unwanted beetles. Christian hated sharing what was his. More extreme measures had to be taken. His attempts became more extreme, as he tried freezing his samples, boiling them and burning them – one incident involving an explosion which left his eyesight weak and his left arm cracked with burn scars like dried mud.

The only way to a conclusion that this sceptical boy could see was through research. He was so desperate to find a way to immortalise his cacophony that he dropped all his other commitments. He stopped talking to his friends, of which there were only few to begin with, and fell behind in school. Of course, the notes to his parents mysteriously disappeared, stuffed into the bottom of the wicker basket with his other valuables. He was willing to devote his life to finding an answer.

A sign of hope finally came in the form of a poster, soaked and trodden on but still intact that Christian picked up on his walk home from school. He deduced that, when it had been nailed to a post or door, it would have been drenched in some thick scent to attract the attention of passers-by, but as it was, only the writing remained. APPRENTICE WANTED: LEIBOWITZ PERFUMERY. APPLY CORNER PARADE Rd, DISTRICT SQUARE. Could it be too good to be true? Although he was a naturally suspicious boy, he couldn’t logically see any way that someone could go about setting this up to target him. Moreover, Christian couldn’t see how going to the address could do him any harm, past making him even more desperate for an answer. Folding the poster carefully and putting it amongst his school books, he hurried home and vowed that, when the time was right and he would know when that was, he was certain, he would find Leibowitz’s Perfumery, and have his fate by the throat.

The sun sets gloriously over the West horizon and Christian eats dinner with his family. All five of them, boy, 'twin', parents, grandfather and the memory of his brother mull over their own thoughts. While the rest contemplate the past, Christian looks only to the future, viewing the present simply as a gateway to it. His destiny is realised and he knows how to get there, and he is confident that the opportunity to fulfil it was approaching. He can almost smell it.