The body records what language refuses to say.
Smell becomes evidence before memory can defend itself.
On a winter night train, a woman realizes that the scent of her pet has changed. Before abandoning the animal, she attempts to capture and preserve its “original” odor as data, only to discover that the smell has already shifted beyond recovery. In this process, olfactory perception ceases to be a private sensation and becomes an archive?absorbed into glass, fabric, breath, and air. The narrative moves between technical language of record management and intimate language of disgust, tracing how bodily emissions regulate attachment, distance, and moral responsibility. Unable to collect before recording, the protagonist confronts the impossibility of preserving any pure origin. What remains is a contaminated record that continues to judge her, raising questions of ownership, responsibility, and abandonment in a world where bodies leave traces beyond intention.
Keywords
experimental literary fictionsensory narrativeolfactory memorybodily archivefeminist body politicsdisgust and ethicsodor and identityrecord managementsensory forensicsbio-surveillanceunspoken bodiesIsophia Fiction
