The Shortcut

The rain on the attic window sounded like someone pouring rice from a great height. Maya had stopped listening to it an hour ago, which was how she knew she was concentrating.

"Grandma labeled everything," Soren said. He held up a shoebox. The label said SPRING, 1971. PROBABLY. He set it down with the others. "She labeled the labels."

Maya was working on a stack of tins. Most held buttons or thread or coins gone green at the edges. The last one was small and round and sealed so tightly she had to use a butter knife. The lid came off with a soft pop, like a held breath let go.

She smelled it before she saw anything inside.

It stopped her hand in the air. Something warm and sweet and a little burnt, something that was not in the room a second ago and now was the only thing in the room. And underneath that, faster than she could think, came a feeling. Not a memory exactly. A whole afternoon she had never lived, full of a kitchen she had never stood in, and a feeling of being small and safe and waiting for something good.

"Soren," she said. "Smell this. But tell me the feeling first, before you think about it."

He leaned over the tin. His face changed before he said anything. His eyebrows went up and then soft.

"Sad," he said. "And happy. At the same time. Like the end of something." He blinked. "Why did I say that? I don't even know what it is."

Inside the tin was a curl of dried orange peel and a brown stick of something. A clove, maybe. A few hard dark crumbs.

"That's weird," Maya said. "I looked at it and felt nothing. I smelled it and felt everything. Before I even knew what it was."

That was the part that snagged her. She picked up SPRING, 1971. PROBABLY and looked at it. Nothing. She looked at the rain. Nothing. But the smell had walked straight into her chest without knocking.

"Try this," she said. She held the tin near Soren and watched his face, then took it away and held up a faded photograph from the box, a woman laughing on a porch. "Picture. Then smell. Tell me which one is faster."

Soren looked at the photograph. "It's nice," he said. "I'm thinking about whether that's Grandma's sister." He was reasoning. She could see him reasoning.

Then she lifted the tin to him.

His reasoning fell off his face. For half a second he was just somewhere else entirely, and then he came back.

"The smell doesn't wait," he said slowly. "The picture, I have to figure out. The smell already decided how I feel before I got a vote."

Maya sat back against a rafter. "Why would smell get to skip the line?"

Soren had his notebook out now, the one he carried that everybody thought was strange. He wasn't writing yet. He was holding the pen still, which for him was the same as thinking hard.

"In science club Mr. Okafor said all the senses go to a place in the middle of the brain first," he said. "A relay station. Everything you see, everything you hear, it all stops there and gets sorted and sent on. Like a post office."

"So sight goes to the post office," Maya said. "Sound goes to the post office."

"Right. Except." Soren stopped. He smelled the tin again, carefully, like he was checking something. "He said smell was different. Smell doesn't go through the relay. He kind of said it fast and moved on."

Maya went very still. This was the feeling she liked best, the feeling of a thing about to fit.

"It doesn't go through the post office," she said.

"It has its own door," Soren said. "Straight into the part of the brain that does feelings and memory. No stop in between. No sorting."

They looked at each other across the boxes.

"That's why it's faster," Maya said. "It's not that smell is stronger. It's that smell is closer. Everything else has to travel. Smell is already there."

Soren was writing now, fast, the pen scratching under the sound of the rain. "That's why you can't think your way to the feeling first," he said. "There's no thinking step. The smell hits the feeling part of your brain before the thinking part even hears about it."

Maya picked up the tin again and breathed it in, and this time she let herself fall into it on purpose. The kitchen she'd never stood in. The waiting for something good. "Soren," she said. "That feeling you got. The sad-and-happy one."

"Yeah."

"That's not your feeling. You never smelled this before. But your brain went straight to a feeling anyway." She turned the tin in her hands. "Where did it come from?"

Soren stopped writing.

"Everybody who ever smelled orange and clove and felt something," Maya said. "It's like the smell knows the feeling and just hands it to you. Without asking if you've earned it."

The rain kept pouring its rice on the glass. Soren looked at the tin like it had grown larger in Maya's hands.

"There are smells out there I've never smelled," he said quietly. "And every one of them has a door straight in. Already built. Just waiting."

"Mr. Okafor said it fast and moved on," Maya said. "He had a whole secret door in the brain and he said it fast and moved on."

Soren closed his notebook. He didn't reach for the photograph or the labeled boxes. He held the little tin up between them, close to both their faces, and breathed in, and waited to see where it took him.