Gaps - Smell

The original manuscript for Gaps, a prose of eight pages, cannot be recovered. After two weeks of procrastination, the writer came to the decision of presenting the fragments, inside his head, as fragments. Therefore, the debris, he could still find, would be presented as a series. The main reason is due to the difficulty of repeating the spontaneity, and flow of the original version, where different observations were linked chrono-analogically.

Gaps - Smell

Another morning, he made his way from the bedroom, passing the kitchen, to the toilet. The toilet facing the sink that is the toilet at the far end of the kitchen, next to the windows,
is the toilet shared by the eight members of the family:
5 children, wife, and dying mom.[1]

A young relative has come to a conclusion that the smell is
Not from the rubbish bin in the kitchen;
Not the plughole in the sink.
But the pale green mosaic tiles in the toilet.

Not the polished, well-glazed pieces on the wall, we feel with our fingers
But the matt and rough ones we step, with our toes grazed at times.

The grooves between the tiles that gave off the slight stench only outsiders are sensitive.


[1] The use of the adjective ‘dying’ is not a social-melodramatic attempt to evoke melancholy or sympathy. And by denying such attempt, it does not imply the opposing sentiment of indifference of, for instance, Meursault in Camus’s L’Stranger. It is merely to state a fact: the physical condition of his mom.