On his 12th birthday, he takes a hit to the head, leaving him dizzy on the pitch. His team gathers around, his mom standing tall in the bleachers. His little sister spins cartwheels in the grass.
Later, the doctor asks him to follow his pencil with his eyes, but his body keeps turning, too, connecting motion to motion. Try to sit still, repeats the doctor. Focus only on the pencil. His sister traces poster images of inner ear infections with her fingertip. Are you feeling dizzy? the doctor asks. Not anymore, he says. But he can now smell colors and has a strong desire to lick metal objects like the doctor’s stethoscope, otoscope, ophthalmoscope.
His mom lets him stay up late that night to watch a news special on the advanced technologies they’re now using to hunt for the Loch Ness Monster—thermal-imaging drones, hydrophones, DNA analysis, sonar technology. The reporter’s thick Scottish brogue appears to him in oscillating sine waves in his peripheral vision. His mom’s voice is wilted lettuce, soft green with blurred edges, as she nudges him from couch to bed. He tries to remember what his dad’s voice looks like, but all he gets is the taste of static. He falls asleep to a symphony of sonic pings ricocheting in his mind, creating neon visuals of the slow, circling sweeps of distant radars cutting silently through deep, dark waters.
At school the next day he can smell rays of sun causing convection currents in the science room, sending dust particles into the light; he can smell the rain before clouds darken the sky. When his teacher asks, what is the standard unit for rainfall measurement, he answers. And then his teacher asks, how many millimeters do you think we’ll see today?
Enough to cancel soccer, he’s afraid.
Instead of playing, he watches a European match while hanging upside down from the living room couch as his sister bounces his soccer ball against the wall. Take it outside, their mom yells, forgetting it’s raining. His sister drops the ball in front of him on her way out. He smells lightning when she opens the back door but registers it as citrus peels and sun-kissed fruit.
He presses his tongue against a smudge of grass and mud on his soccer ball. How long til dinner? he asks, but his mom doesn’t hear him. He mutes the TV and listens to the smell of the rain gathering in the back of his throat like the sulfur clouds of Venus; the cold breath of a storm.
He feels the energy building in his ears while watching his sister through the back window, cartwheeling through soaked grass. He feels the heat of a pressurized snow globe bending inward all around them, a nameless danger sidling upward through his spine. It smells like sandalwood and stripped copper wires and Old Spice, like something he thinks his dad used to wear or say. If only he could remember.
