The Heady Scent Of Clarity
20250610
Prompt from PrideOnThePage
The shopkeeper was barely visible in the shadows, his faded coat blending in such that his pale face and many hands seemed to float in front of her. “Magic? Of course I sell magic. Did some fool paint over my sign?”
“No, no, I just…”Sam forced a polite smile. “I wanted to make sure I’m in the right place.”
“Well. You’re in a shop that sells magic. Whether that’s the ‘right’ place depends.” Those watery, bulging eyes peered at her. “What do you want?”
“Erm… what do you have-”
He huffed. “I sell bespoke solutions. There’s no browsing here. Either decide what you want or get out.”
“I… I want to disappear.”
One hand scratched his chin. Another tapped the counter. “Go poof? Turn invisible? Wake up in an entirely different place where nobody knows who you are?”
“Can you do that?”
“I wouldn’t suggest it if I couldn’t. Now, what do you truly want?”
Sam rubbed her arms and tried to pick apart the muddle in her chest. Knots so old and tight they’d practically crystallised.
“I want… to be enough.”
“Enough what?”
“Enough anything. Gay enough, straight enough, woman enough, man enough, funny enough, serious enough…” Sam huffed, then sighed, her annoyance dissolving into comfortable self-disgust. “I guess I want to be normal. Can you do that?”
All of the shopkeeper’s hands were resting on the counter now. Each slowly tapping, slightly off-beat. The effect was grating and mesmerising. “I could. But I think you’re better off buying some clarity and coming back.”
“Clarity, huh? Go on.”
At once the shopkeeper vanished into the darkness.
Sam’s senses strained.
Rattling. Scraping. Bubbling.
Acidic tang. Floral scent. Smoke, oily, like from an old-fashioned burner.
“Here.”
The sudden word made her jump. Or perhaps that was the shopkeeper emerging from the gloom, one hand outstretched. It held a little stoppered glass bottle. Perfume?
“Take a sniff.”
Sam gingerly complied. The whiff tickled her nose. It smelt of… It smelt of…
Silence. It smelt of silence.
The voices muttering at the back of her mind fell quiet. The words sticking to her slipped off. The vague buzzing itch of her life grew still. It was suddenly clear. Not simple, in fact it was complicated and confusing, but she was able to study it. Like a snapshot of a bustling crowd.
A pale finger gently nudged the stopper closed, and she was jolted back to reality. The words swarmed around her once more. But… with the memory of that deep silence so close, they felt less like darting attackers and more like cheeky flies.
She clasped the bottle tight and met his gaze for the first time. “How much?”
“Twenty-eight pounds, fifteen pence.”
Exactly what she had… minus her bus fare home.
As she pressed the money into a hand he added “Your next purchase will require an ounce of doubts. So do have those in order before you come back.”
Sam blinked, then flashed a smile. “Yeah. Alright.”
Prompt was “Silence”.
[Don’t get me wrong - I love words. What writer doesn’t? But words illuminate and constrain in equal measure. Sometimes pinning something down with words makes it harder to understand, while staring blankly at clouds for half an hour lets understanding percolate. I find that often what I need for the right words to coalesce is silence.]
Leeron—
I smiled all the way through—from first flicker of those many hands in the dark, right to that last nudge about ounces of doubt. You caught something here that speaks well beyond the playful tale. How often have we longed to trade a piece of ourselves for some imagined clarity, or for the promise of enoughness? You voiced it through Sam so deftly—and in doing so, mirrored a threshold many of us have stood before, bottle in hand, unsure whether to pay the fare.
And this—"It smelt of silence."—what a perfect distillation. Not an emptiness, not a void, rather a space where the swarming words might be met anew. You reminded me here that silence is no blank space; it is a lens, one we can hold to the light. I carry that with me now, like Sam with her small glass bottle—knowing the voices will return, yet no longer fearing their flutter.
Such a wonderful adaptation of this prompt and its questions. You brought the magic in, and let it leave room for the reader to breathe.