The Still Room
Harum Oleh Memori · Restricted
The Still
Room
This room is not linked from anywhere. It opens for one word, and the word is assembled from seven seals scattered through the house.
Harum Oleh Memori · The Still Room
The Still
Room
Where the house keeps the things it has not decided what to do with yet.
One
A letter to
whoever got here
You read seven pages you were not required to read, and you did it without being sold anything on the way. That is rarer than it should be, so this room is the thanks.
A still room was the part of an old house where the useful things were made: the waters, the cordials, the tinctures, the remedies. It sat between the kitchen and the laboratory and it belonged to whoever in the household actually knew what they were doing. Nothing in it was for display. Everything in it was in progress.
That is what this page is. Two things live here that are not published anywhere else, because they are not finished, and because a house that only shows finished things is a shop rather than a house.
Nothing here is for sale. It will change without notice. If you come back and something has moved, that is the point.
Harum Oleh Memori
Two
A composition
without a bottle
Every house carries a few of these: an accord that works, attached to no product, waiting for a reason. This one is called Ruang Tunggu, the waiting room. It is the smell of an airport at four in the morning in a tropical country, which is warm plastic, cold air being pushed too hard, wet tarmac somewhere outside, coffee that has been sitting, and clean skin that has been awake too long.
Sketch · parts, not a formula
| Bergamot, cold pressed, held short | 6 parts |
| Green mandarin | 3 parts |
| Aldehyde, the soapy one, trace | 1 part |
| Petrichor accord over wet mineral | 9 parts |
| Coffee absolute, stale reading | 4 parts |
| Ambrette seed, for the skin | 7 parts |
| Vetiver, Haitian, washed | 11 parts |
| White musk, the flat kind | 14 parts |
| Benzoin, held back | 2 parts |
The problem with it is the coffee. It reads as a cafe rather than as a terminal, and a terminal is the whole idea. Three attempts so far. If it is ever solved, it will not be announced.
Three
The fiction that
was cut
Fiction publishes one story for every fragrance that exists. This one belongs to a fragrance that does not, which is why it never ran.
The customs officer opened her suitcase and found forty small bottles, none of them labelled, all of them full.
She explained that they were samples. He asked what of. She said her mother, mostly. Her mother in the year before, her mother in the kitchen, her mother in the hospital corridor where the air was so clean it removed her entirely.
He held one up to the light for a long time, the way you hold up something you have decided not to understand, and then he closed the case and waved her through, and she carried her mother across a border in forty pieces without declaring a single one.
The Undeclared. Never made.
The still room changes when the house has something new it is not ready to release. Your key stays good.
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