The Left-Handed Orange

The rain came sideways against the workshop window, so Maya was stuck upstairs with her aunt Dilan and a hundred little brown bottles.

Dilan was behind on an order and did not want questions. She said so twice. Maya was allowed to sit on the stool by the shelf and touch nothing wet.

Maya touched nothing wet. She uncapped bottles instead, one at a time, and breathed.

The eighth bottle stopped her.

It smelled like spearmint. Cool and green, the exact smell of the gum her grandfather chewed. She checked the label. It said CARVONE.

The ninth bottle, right beside it, also said CARVONE.

She smelled it. Caraway. Warm and brown and a little bit like rye bread, the smell of the crackers at her grandfather's house, the ones she did not like.

Same word. Same letters. Two completely different smells.

"Aunt Dilan," Maya said. "Two of your bottles are labeled wrong."

"They're not," said Dilan, not looking up. Her hands were counting drops.

"They both say carvone. They smell like two different things."

"They're both carvone."

Maya lined the bottles up on the shelf edge, spearmint on the left, caraway on the right. She smelled left. She smelled right. She waited a breath and did it again, because the first time could be a mistake and the second time could not.

Spearmint. Caraway. Left. Right.

"Then something's different about them," Maya said, "and you're not telling me."

Dilan set down her dropper. She looked at Maya the way you look at a small animal that has gotten into the cupboard.

"Hold up your hands," Dilan said.

Maya held them up.

"Are they the same?"

"Yes."

"Press them palm to palm."

Maya pressed. Thumb met thumb, little finger met little finger.

"Now lay one on top of the other. Both palms down."

Maya laid her right hand flat on the table and put her left hand on top of it. The thumbs stuck out on opposite sides. Nothing lined up. One hand pointed its thumb east, the other pointed west, and no amount of sliding fixed it.

"Same hand," said Dilan. "Same bones, same fingers, same everything. But you can't make one sit exactly on the other. One's the mirror of the other."

"Like gloves," Maya said.

"Like gloves. A left glove will not go on your right hand no matter how you shove it."

Maya looked at the two bottles.

"The molecules are gloves," she said slowly. "Left ones and right ones."

"Same atoms. Same everything. Built in mirror image." Dilan picked up her dropper again. "One version of carvone, your nose reads as spearmint. The mirror version, your nose reads as caraway. Your nose can tell left from right. Most people never know they're doing it."

Maya's skin went strange. Not cold. Awake.

Because a smell is a shape fitting into a socket in your nose, the way a key fits a lock, and here were two keys that were mirror images, and one opened the spearmint door and one opened the caraway door, and her own nose had been reading the handedness of molecules all afternoon without being told it could.

"So my nose knows," Maya said. "It knows left from right. On something that small."

"Every nose does. Even people who never think about it once."

Maya sat with that. The rain kept coming sideways. She picked up the spearmint bottle and turned it in the gray light, as if she might see the handedness in the liquid, which she could not, which was the whole point. The difference was too small to see and big enough to smell across a room.

"Does it matter anywhere else?" she asked. "Besides smelling nice?"

Dilan's hands slowed.

"There was a medicine," she said. "Before I was born. For women who felt sick when they were pregnant. It worked. It was two versions of the same molecule mixed together, left and right, just like your carvone."

"And one of them helped," Maya said.

"One of them helped." Dilan capped a bottle very carefully. "And the mirror one, the glove that went on the other hand, it reached into how the babies were being built and it built them wrong. Same atoms. Same everything. Mirror image. Thousands of children. Nobody had understood yet that the two hands could do two completely different things inside a body."

The workshop was quiet except for the rain.

"They understand now," Dilan said, before Maya could get frightened. "That's the whole reason people like me weigh things this carefully. That's why chemists spend their whole lives learning to make only the left glove, or only the right one, on purpose. The handedness is the first thing you check now. Because of what happened when nobody checked."

Maya looked at her two bottles. Spearmint on the left. Caraway on the right. Same word on both labels, and her aunt was right, both labels were correct.

She thought about her grandfather chewing his spearmint gum and eating his caraway crackers, the smell she liked and the smell she didn't, sitting side by side in his kitchen his whole life. The same molecule. Reflected. He had been tasting the difference between a left hand and a right hand and calling one gum and one crackers.

"Everything's like this," Maya said. It wasn't a question. "Everything I smell. Everything I eat. There's a left one and a right one and my body is reading which is which the whole time."

"Sugar too," Dilan said. "Your body can only burn one handedness of sugar. The mirror sugar would taste sweet and give you nothing. Your whole self is built out of one hand. All of you, only the left glove, top to bottom."

"Why left?"

Dilan smiled for the first time all afternoon.

"Nobody knows," she said. "That one, nobody has figured out yet. Every living thing on Earth chose the same hand at the very beginning, and we don't know why, and we don't know what happened to all the right-handed life that could have been."

Maya picked up the two bottles, one in each hand, spearmint on the left, caraway on the right, and held them apart at arm's length like a scale that would never balance.

She closed her eyes and breathed in, first from her left hand, then from her right.