The Smell With a Thousand Names

The bakery was closed, but it still smelled like it was thinking about bread.

Soren's aunt had gone to the back to hose out the mixing bowls. She had left them with a rag, a spray bottle, and one loaf sitting alone on the cooling rack. It was almost black on top.

"She burned it on purpose," Maya said.

"Nobody burns bread on purpose."

"She did. Look. The others are all the same gold. This one she left in." Maya picked it up and turned it over. "Smell."

Soren smelled. Coffee. Almost. And something like toasted nuts, and something under that like caramel, and something under that he had no word for at all.

"That's not bread," he said.

"It's the same bread. Same flour, same water. She told me. The only thing different is how long it sat in the heat."

Soren tore a piece off the pale bottom, where it hadn't browned. He chewed. "Flour. Kind of nothing." Then he tore a piece off the black top and put it in his mouth. His eyebrows went up.

"See," Maya said.

"That's a hundred things." He chewed slower. "That's a hundred things and none of them are in the pale part."

"So the heat made them."

"The heat made them out of nothing?"

"Out of the flour. There's sugar in flour. Aunt Ree said. And the protein stuff."

Soren pulled his notebook out of his back pocket and set it on the flour-dusted counter. He wrote sugar and beside it protein and drew a line between them with an arrow, and then he stopped, because he did not know what to put at the end of the arrow.

"How many flavors do you think are in it," Maya asked. She wasn't really asking him. She was holding the black crust up to the window light like it might be see-through.

"Like five. Nutty, coffee, caramel, and the two I can't name."

"More than five."

"Okay, ten."

"Aunt Ree," Maya called, "how many flavors are in the burnt part?"

A laugh came from the back. "Nobody knows. Hundreds. Thousands, maybe. That's the whole thing about it." The hose hissed. "They keep finding new ones."

Soren looked at his arrow. "Thousands," he said. "From two ingredients."

"That can't be right," Maya said, and she said it the way she said things when she already believed them but wanted to catch up to why. "Two things can't make a thousand things."

"Unless they don't just make one thing." Soren tapped the counter. "What if the sugar and the protein react, and then that new thing reacts, and that reacts, all at the same time. Like a room full of people all talking to whoever's next to them."

"And the ones they make start talking too."

"Right. So you can't line them up. It's not step one, step two. It's everybody at once."

Maya put the crust down. "So could you make just the coffee smell? On its own? Skip all the rest?"

"Aunt Ree," Soren called. "Could you make just one of the flavors by itself? Just the coffee one?"

His aunt appeared in the doorway, wiping her hands, and she was grinning like they'd walked into a trap she'd set that morning. "People have tried. Big companies. They take one flavor compound out of roasted stuff and make a whole vat of just that. And it smells wrong. Thin. It smells like a photograph of coffee."

"Why," said Maya.

"Because it was never one thing. It was always the whole crowd. The coffee smell you love is a thousand smells leaning on each other. Pull one out, it forgets what it was." She flicked water at them and went back to the sink. Then she reached over and tore off another piece of the black crust, and instead of eating it she just held it under her nose and breathed in, long.

"Say a smell you can find in there," she said.

"Nutty," said Soren.

"Now say the one next to it."

He breathed in. "There's a like, dark one. Almost bitter. Almost like the smell of a match."

"And under that."

"Something sweet again. Butter, maybe. Or flowers, that's weird, why flowers." He kept going. Every time he named one he found the edge of another one behind it, and behind that one another, and it did not stop, it did not bottom out, the way a word you say too many times stops being a word.

"It doesn't run out," he said quietly.

"No."

"Every time I find one there's another one I didn't smell yet. And nobody knows how many. Not even the people whose whole job it is."

Maya's eyes were bright. "You know what's the same? Toast. And a steak. And coffee. And when you roast onions till they go brown. Aunt Ree said it's all the same thing happening."

"The same reaction."

"The same one. So every brown food you ever loved." She stopped.

"Was a crowd," Soren finished. "A different crowd every time. That's why you can't ever make it twice exactly."

He looked down at his notebook. He had drawn sugar, and protein, and one arrow. He looked at how small the arrow was. He crossed nothing out. He just started drawing more arrows off the first one, and off those ones more, until the two words disappeared under a tangle of lines that ran clean off the edge of the page and had no end that he could draw.

Maya picked up the burnt loaf and carried it to the window and held it in the last of the daylight, and the two of them stood there in the closed bakery taking turns breathing it in, calling out each new smell as they found it, and there was always, every single time, one more.