Burnt toast. Coffee dregs as they singe in the glass pot. Pungent. Acidic. But a strange thing has happened. She can smell nothing. Nothing! She calls her daughter and says, “I can’t smell anything.” Her daughter knows this because her mother calls her often, recently several times in one day, to say the same thing: “I can’t smell anything.”

“You just called me, Mom,” the daughter says. The mother doesn’t remember. 

“Isn’t that so strange? How you can just lose your sense of smell?”

The daughter knows that it’s not her mother’s sense of smell that’s gone. It’s her sense of everything. She is confused, a petulant child one minute, an imperious grand dame the other. 

“A specialist can help me,” the mother says. 

There are no more specialists. Only a hospice nurse, who tells the daughter, “Your mother is quite a character,” and a 25-year-old health aide who says, “Your mother is sweet!” when the daughter asks if her mother is making trouble. The weakening mother calls the nurse a “bitch” and the aide a “fat whore” but everyone pretends that she is a docile old lady, even the daughter who dutifully visits her every day. 

“It’s like she’s pouring a bucket of ice over me,” the mother says when the daughter asks why she has not let the aide help her shower. “She doesn’t know how to make the water hot!” The mother is frustrated too. There is so much she wants to say but she can’t form words, they get stuck between her brain and her mouth. She knows something is not right, but no one will tell her what is wrong. So she pretends, nods with a smile when her daughter says, “As soon as you are better, we will live together.” This is a sweet, shared lie; like cotton candy, it dissolves the moment it hits the tongue. 

The daughter brings her mother a chocolate cake with vanilla icing, sugary pink roses, “Happy Birthday” written in cursive with thin lines of blue frosting. The daughter puts candles in it; she sings to the mother and waits for her to blow them out. The mother forgets what to do so the daughter reminds her. The mother puffs out air, her breath strong enough to move the flames but too weak to extinguish them. They go on like this until the daughter says, “Let me help!” and exhales alongside her mother. 

The smoke wafts into the air as mother and daughter stare silently at the cake. The daughter knows that this will be her mother’s last birthday. The mother knows that she can smell nothing of the candle’s pungent aftermath. Both understand there is no word to describe the char that lingers after the original fire goes out.