Diethyl Sweetmeat 

Meg Nadine Wenzel

Lux van Lambry, the fox-woman of Saline Street—"Not Quite There," they’d call her—licked her ivory canines and stuck her snout into an almost empty blue bottle. The shop bell tinked and her ears perked up, but Lux didn’t turn around from her spot behind the perfumery’s counter. Through the musk of velvet, the warmed wool of sheep and grocery store smell leaked through. It was just her parents getting home. Adoptive parents, they’d always remind her. No need for sheep to adopt a fox, they’d say, as if she could turn back time by twenty-five years.

"We found your favorite," the chipper sheep-woman and sheep-man said in unison, identified as Agniya and Niels van Lambry, The Best Perfumists on the Coast by the weathered plaque outside the shop door. A bundle of white lilies sat upon the countertop, tied with wood twine, fresh and bright like slices of the moon. Lux flashed her toothy smile and plucked one of the petals to eat it. They were supposed to be used in the perfumes, but she’d had a rough few days after laying eyes on the new tall, nervous glass of water that was sheep-man Etienne Toussaint—the dreamy librarian in corduroy that wanted nothing to do with her beyond her tinctures of thyme and orris root. He’d give you a chance if you were a sheep, she’d think. No need for the likes of a fox ‘round the sheep pen.

"I want him to want me," Lux let slip. "More than anything in the world."

"You have to actually speak to him, then," her mother replied after a moment, messing subtly with the basket of greenery in her grasp. She looked to Niels with her common glassy gaze, but quickly shifted back. Every story had the same ending, but there had to be ways to rewrite them. "How about you go to your room and put something new together? A gift for your desired, perhaps. You’ve always been so good with new combinations. Things we’ve never even considered."

A gift from a fox is nothing but faux friendliness. It does not come from the heart, for a fox cannot feel anything but vengefulness. A manipulative maniac, infiltrating what does not belong to her.

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The label on the bottle was still drying its inkiness in the evening’s open window breeze. It read, Tranquility. Lux sat at her perfumery table with her face pressed against the pearly varnished wood, breathing in the tuberose scent of the pink-tinted glass before her and shutting her eyes tight, imagining her imminent wedding in which the waxy flowers would blow whispers of fragrance all over the venue. She’d be held closely in Etienne’s embrace, prancing past tables of white to vaudeville foxtrot and waving to respective families to join in for a photo for the city journal: “Local Fox and Sheep Wed—Wouldn’t You Know, Everything Is Fine!”

It just needed one more thing, though. Something special for Etienne, she whispered to herself, grabbing a glass syringe from a drawer and drawing a clear liquid—Diethyl ether, the sticker said—out of a precariously acquired apothecary bottle from the sketchy salesman down the road. Lux dripped the sweetly scented fluid into Tranquility and gave it a light sniff to test its beauty. It was pleasant enough to grace the nostrils of Etienne Toussaint and nobody else.

Lux couldn’t sleep all night. Someone would be in love with her for the very first time come afternoon. "Local Citizen Wins Prestigious Research Award, Weds Fiancée Same Day," graced the paper that fateful morning with a handsome photo of Etienne Toussaint in a crushed velvet vest, alongside his new ewe wife draped in pearls and white.

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"A wedding gift for you," Lux managed to choke out, handing Etienne the bottle of Tranquility wrapped in cream white ribbon, as well as his actual order of an orchid perfume that he surely wouldn’t be wearing himself. She couldn’t say congratulations. "It’s one-of-a-kind. A special cologne," she added. "By me. For a very faithful and accomplished customer." Her smile twitched and her body felt like a smashed pinecone, jagged and opened by car tires on the side of the pavement. She was trying not to let her insides leak out. Etienne adjusted his glasses and took the gift. 

"Why thank you," he said giddily, eager to test it. "I suppose reaching familiar status is quite the substantial achievement! What are the notes this time?"

Lux wasn’t even paying attention to what he was saying. He was speaking to her, which meant he was acknowledging her existence, which meant he wasn’t frightened of her. She felt the dizziness of possibility stir her insides into a mush that manifested itself in reddened fur of the face. "Pardon?"

"The notes of the cologne. What’s in it? I smell tuberose, which my wife, Janet, happens to love very dearly," he paused momentarily, running after his own breath, "but…what’s th…"

Etienne’s voice thinned into a smeared sentence of incomprehensible attempts at verbal communication, but it lacked anything of substance. The words didn’t matter, anyway, because he was soon on the floor in a state of anesthetized blur.

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I don’t feel sorry for you. You just don’t like to listen.

Etienne smelled of heaven, transparent like morning dew on tuberose stems, stems like prison bars. How can I preserve this smell? His long eyelashes flitted against closed eyelids, eyes that could not cement what they were or weren’t seeing to any conscious state of being. Wool wet with Tranquility, or maybe it was something else entirely, slooshed against a maw’s garden of teeth. His palm was lace white, free from stain, wrapped within sun fur at the shoulder—dancing position. There was a wound on the neck of the body that she didn’t recall making, but who else could have done this? It has always been this way. You see it in the papers all the time. It’s fateful wiring.

Agniya stood statuesque and blurry-eyed in the frame of the bedroom door while her daughter mixed tears with blood with saliva with want.

"I want to go to bed. I don’t feel good," Lux whimpered through a full mouth, contorted on the floor in mourning-hunger. There was a whirring in her ears, a nonstop music in her skull. Her fur was matted with someone else. "I want to lay down for a little while. I don’t feel well. Mother," she spit out a chunk of perfumed fleece, though the strands hung to her teeth and tried to stick back to her tongue, "can you put me to bed?"

Forever passed in heaves and chews until Agniya nodded frantically. "I’ll get your father. We’ll get you to bed, pumpkin. You’ll get better, I promise. The doctor will come and fix you up and everything will be just fine. I’ll get your calming tincture."

Lux nodded along, quivering with submission to a feeling that had first lodged itself in her stomach when she was little. It was some type of love, she thought. Some type. It couldn’t be anything but that.

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