Jason Wood Comes to His Senses (Short Story)

Jason Wood never did figure out how he lost his sense of smell. Every so often, his family and some of his close friends would admonish him to see a doctor about it, but Jason was a man long accustomed to dismissing all physical ailments as being an “old football injury” or merely “something I ate.” It had begun so long ago that it couldn't be blamed on the food, which left “old football injury.”

There might not have been enough clues left for the doctor to piece together anyway. The truth was that Jason remembered virtually nothing about his early childhood (old football injury), and nothing at all about smells. At best, Jason could vaguely recall that at the age of nine, there were eight things he could smell. Four of them he found pleasant enough: garlic, tasty food other than garlic (all of this smelled exactly the same to Jason, even at age nine), gasoline and his own flatulence. The four remaining smells Jason could perceive were coffee, cigarette smoke, rain showers and food he didn't like (which all smelled the same to him, and more or less like onions). Those, Jason absolutely detested.

One by one, Jason lost his ability to smell those things as well. Rain showers were the first to go, which made sense. He could barely smell those when he was nine. Cigarette smoke was next, and that didn't surprise him, either. He couldn't smell any other kind of smoke at all. Coffee and gasoline held out the longest. People told Jason that he was lucky he couldn't smell things, and he more or less believed them.

There was no discernible pattern to Jason's smelling loss. He didn't lose a steady one smell per year, and it didn't happen exponentially. He didn't wipe them all out at once when he took up drinking, either. Yet the fact remained that by the time Jason went off to college, he could not smell anything at all. Far from being surprised, Jason had been anticipating that the day when he could no longer smell coffee would come sooner or later.

Jason Wood never did figure out why, after more than ten years without one, he suddenly regained his full sense of smell while boarding an overbooked 747 two days before Christmas, but he wasn't surprised to find that he regretted it.