Flash Fiction: Sensory Prompt (smell) - whisky

Whisky on leather. That’s what father smelled like – child me believed for so many years that that bottle kept in the high cupboard was what he used to shine his shoes and his belts. I’d watch him, soft cloth in hand, wipe along the smooth surfaces, getting into the contours loving and carefully as if the shoes were living creatures. The same hard, strong hand would calm the cat on his lap, and so I would imagine the shoes purring as he polished.

The sharp delectable smell would come to me over the kitchen floor, as I sat on the stone, and I would breathe it in. I thought it was poisonous, I truly did, but that didn’t stop me breathing it. Only father could drink it, not even mother, and so only father could stand to be so close to the soaked cloth. I didn’t make the connection between the small flat pot beside him and the shine of the shoes. All I could feel in my nose was that whisky, the drink of evenings and Sundays after church, and it was so him, so intrinsically utterly him, that drinking it now evokes him as strongly as he was sitting there today, shoe in hand, cat purring on his lap, tea on the table. 

Whisky isn’t poisonous after all, I’ve found.