Phoebe Sneezed and Smelled Bacon
Phoebe sneezed and smelled bacon. “What is this?” Nobody else was home and hadn’t been for four days so it couldn’t be a lingering smell. It was distinct. Bacon.
“I’m gonna look this up,” she said aloud to herself. It should be understood that Phoebe talked a lot to herself. You might say it was a function of being older and living alone, but that wouldn’t be true. She had always talked to herself, rather enjoying the conversations.
Funny, because when she sat down to write, she didn’t transcribe the words in her brain. Instead, she saw a picture and just wrote down what was happening. Sometimes it was a still. Sometimes, an actual movie. Even her dreams, back in the day when she had them every night and remembered them. She was pretty sure she still had them, just that trauma made her unable to recall more than a dozen over the past twenty years.
But smelling bacon. This was new. She had always had a great nose and would often detect things that people around her said they didn’t smell. She had always thought she was catching a whiff of something on a draft of air blowing in from somewhere. Sometimes she would speculate from where and write a little story.
But that was when she lived in the midst of a family and there were the usual comings and goings of busy people. Now, Phoebe recognized the responses of a solitary older person, and a certain tendency toward hypochondria. As soon as she had a twinge or a twist that was even the slightest tad unusual, she was sure she had something.
The sneeze smell. She went to Google, surprised to find answers to her exact query What does it mean when you sneeze and then smell bacon? “This is too easy,” her skeptical self verbalized. The dog was in the room so she looked over toward the sweet creature. “How could it be a thing that people might smell bacon when they sneeze? This has to be a tailored AI response.”
Still, she kept reading and discovered a condition called phantosmia where people do become aware of scents after a sneeze. “Ooh, I love the word.” The dog paid little attention.
Faithful Google went on to tell her that it was probably meaningless, a chance triggering of some olfactory nerves. “How do they come together to smell like bacon?” she asked the screen. Scrolling informed her it could be a symptom of a seizure if it didn’t go away in a couple of days.
“Hmmm,” Phoebe said. “Do I have some sort of precondition for a seizure? Okay, I know what I’m doing, I’m speculating about all the things that happen to old people and assuming I am minutes away from something catastrophic. Well, maybe not minutes, but soon enough.”
“If I have a stroke, it better be the kind that kills me right away.”
The bacon smell disappeared. “Too bad,” she said. “I like bacon.”
Holly Redell Witte
Holly Redell Witte has been writing and publishing in newspapers and magazines for years. Turning to fiction in the last five years, she has been published in Blood+Honey, Screamin Mamas, Sudden Flash, the Red Wheelbarrow Anthology, An Unsuspected Place, and a forthcoming anthology benefiting victims of the LA fires. She workshopped her short fiction and a novel at the Yale Writers’ Workshop, 2023 and ’24.
