Scent Notes: Pistachio and almond with exotic spices.

Rebecca couldn’t wait to get to sleep. It was past 1:00 am and she was up with her nearly one-year-old daughter, Parker, who had recently decided that sleep was for the weak, and little Parker was anything but weak. Rebecca had fed her, rocked her, changed her diaper, read her books, on what felt like a never-ending loop for the past two hours. Her eyes were bleary; she’d had maybe a few hours of sleep in the last three days. This had been hard enough the first time with her seven-year-old son, Oliver. Now, parenting a full-blown kid and a meltdown-prone baby was frying her nerves. Though, as Oliver would remind her, you couldn’t actually fry your nerves.

Oliver had recently gotten into human biology. It was his obsession. He came home from school each day with new facts and information acquired from both his teachers and fellow classmates. The information from his classmates was unreliable but fantastical, so Rebecca had decided to get him some human physiology and biology books for his birthday. Now he came home and pored over the books, shouting across the house to her to tell her every single fact he was learning. 

Some things he’d told her recently: the human mouth produces about a liter of saliva a day; if you took all the blood vessels out of an adult’s body and laid them end-to-end, you’d circle the Equator four times (which led to a discussion about what the Equator was, and the size of the planet, and the solar system); the human heart beats more than three billion times in an average lifespan; the human nose is estimated to to recognize a trillion different scents; and your blood makes up about eight percent of your body weight. Now these facts rattled around Rebecca’s brain between Parker’s cries. She forced herself to forget that human teeth are as strong as shark teeth, and to try one more feed with Parker. 

Now, just shy of 2:00 am, Parker finally fell asleep. Rebecca laid her in her crib and slowly, quietly closed the door and tiptoed down the hall to her own bed. Has the sight of her snoring husband in their big bed ever been as wonderful and simultaneously rage-inducing? Probably, but Rebecca couldn’t care for long. She slipped into the warm bed, turned on her sound machine, and fell asleep instantly. She dreamt of the systems of her body, the layers and complexities she would never see or fully understand. She wondered if there was a key to getting her daughter out of this sleep regression buried in her daughter somewhere. But before she could get the answer, she woke with a start. Someone was staring at her.

She opened her eyes, already panicking, afraid there was an intruder. She clocked that it was just 4:30 am now, not nearly enough sleep. The eyes walked closer and she realized it was Oliver. He stared at her calmly. “Oliver! Honey, you scared me. Are you okay? What’s wrong? Did you have a bad dream?” She sat up, reached out to him, and pulled him into a hug. He still wasn’t saying anything. Rebecca was getting concerned. “Honey? What’s wrong? Talk to me. Did something happen to you or your sister?” She felt his head shake and she let him pull away. She knelt down and looked into his eyes. “Talk to me, sweetie.” Oliver leaned in close, bringing his face so close to hers their noses were touching. Without blinking, Oliver said, “Your skeleton is always wet.” Then he turned around and bolted from their bedroom back to his. And with that, she knew she’d get no more sleep that night … or maybe ever again.

Scent Notes: Pistachio and almond with exotic spices.