Full Bloom

Prologue

We experience scent for the first time in utero at only twelve weeks, and by birth we are primed to associate our mother’s scent with comfort, nourishment, and safety.

Scent is always there, its volatile molecules swirling, speaking to us before language, before cognition, before culture.

It is our most primal sensory system, bypassing our intellect and directly stimulating our emotional nervous system.

Transporting us through memories of pleasure or terror.

Tempting us, warning us.

Yet after just fifteen minutes, humans go nose-blind to any scent. No matter how alarming the odor, if we can’t escape it, we get used to it. And once we get used to it, it becomes imperceptible. As if it disappears.

But the danger remains.

So one has a short window to act.

Luckily, young Isaiah Patterson wasn’t one to keep quiet.

—

“What’s that smell?” Isaiah wrinkled his nose.

“I don’t know.” Jayden remained focused on pressing a Spiderman action figure into a toy truck. The boys were playing in the shabby hallway of their apartment building at Hendricks Houses.

“Ah man, it stinks. You farted.”

Jayden frowned, hard. “I did not!”

“Did too. Jeez, I got to clear the air.” Isaiah went to find his big sister, Kiara, who was babysitting them while their mom was at work.

Kiara was in their bedroom. She was dancing in front of her phone, which she had propped up on the dresser.

“We got Febreze?” Isaiah’s voice sounded funny because he was pinching his nose.

Kiara dropped her arms with a groan and stomped over to tap the phone. “No. Go away, I’m making a TikTok.”

“You got a perfume or somethin’?”

“Leave me alone.”

“We gon’ play outside then.”

Kiara ripped out her headphones. “No, I told you, you gotta stay in the hallway.”

“It smells like rotten eggs out there!”

“Then play inside the apartment, you ain’t goin’ outside!”

Isaiah stomped out of the room, stomps he had learned from his sister.

No sooner had he reached Jayden than Kiara popped out of the apartment. Her face looked different, worried.

“Where’s it smell like rotten eggs?” she asked.

The boys pointed to the far wall.

She walked over, sniffing the air like a dog.

“It wasn’t me,” Jayden said again.

Kiara turned back to them, this time she looked scared. “Boys, you have to go outside, right now, go all the way to the sidewalk and don’t talk to strangers. I’ll meet you there in five minutes.”

“Why? What’s happening?” Isaiah asked.

Kiara put her hands on both boys’ shoulders. “We have to get out of the building, it’s not safe. Go downstairs and outside all the way to the mailbox at the corner, okay? Wait for me at the mailbox.”

“What about our toys?”

“Leave them! Go, now! Hurry!” She shooed them into the stairwell and darted back down the hallway.

Isaiah hung his head out looking after her. The way Kiara was banging on the neighbors’ doors frightened him.

Kiara and Isaiah lived on the fourth floor; Jayden lived down the hall from them. But Jayden wasn’t Isaiah’s only friend in the building. When Kiara was too little to babysit him, Ernie used to watch both of them. Ernie always said if something bad happened, Isaiah should come get him.

“Are you coming?” Jayden asked.

“I gotta get Ernie.” Isaiah peeled off on the third floor, leaving Jayden on the landing.

“But your sister said—”

“Go on, I’ll meet you at the mailbox.” He hustled down to Ernie’s apartment and knocked on the door with their special knock, then waited for Ernie to walk to the door. Finally the door opened.

“Look at you-uu, taller by the day!” Ernie’s signature singsong greeting. Isaiah hugged him while Ernie patted his back with a shaky hand. “Come in, son, come in. I was just about to put the kettle on, do you want a cup of tea? I’ll make it sweet.”

Isaiah considered while Ernie shuffled to the kitchen stove. “Can I have chocolate milk instead?”

Ernie’s hand paused midair above the stove knob. “Why yes. And you’re right, it’s too hot for tea. I’ll get the Hershey’s syrup.” He opened the fridge instead.

Ernie poured him a glass of milk and let Isaiah add the chocolate as he stirred. The boy drank half the glass in one gulp. Then he remembered his purpose.

“We have to get out of the building. Kiara says it’s not safe.”

“Now why would she say that?”

“I’m not sure. She’s banging on everyone’s doors and telling them. But I wanted to be the one to tell you.”

“Oh my, that does sound serious. Your sister is a very bright girl, I’d better go speak to her.

Let me get my oxygen.” Ernie shuffled to the side of his recliner and wheeled out the oxygen tank.

Isaiah thought it looked like a rocket pack, but he didn’t like when Ernie put the plastic tubes in his nose.

“Do you have to have that?”

“It helps me breathe. Don’t ever smoke cigarettes, son, it ruins your lungs. And food never tastes or smells as good.”

They headed down the hall. Isaiah had to slow his footsteps to stay beside the old man and his squeaky, rolling oxygen tank.

“This elevator ain’t ever gettin’ fixed.” Ernie shook his head. “Everything in this building as broken down as me.”

“You’re not broken, Ernie, you’re just old.”

Ernie chuckled and they entered the stairwell. “Now you hold onto the banister, son, I don’t want you taking a tumble.”

Isaiah held the railing with one hand and squeezed his nose with the other. The rotten egg smell was stronger here.

Voices shouted from the hallway above them, then people hurried down the stairs, passing them. But Isaiah stayed with his friend. Ernie’s oxygen tank banged against each metal-tipped step behind him . Clang…clang…clang.

At last they reached the lobby. Kiara was at the front doors ushering their neighbors outside when she spotted her little brother. “What are you still doing here? I—”

Kiara’s gaze fell on Ernie’s oxygen tank and her eyes got wide. Without another word, she lunged for the tank and swept it away like a linebacker, ripping the plastic tubes from Ernie’s face and dislodging his glasses. “This can’t be near us!”

Kiara repeatedly jammed the button to the elevator, taped off and stuck at ground level, until the doors opened to the garbage-strewn carriage. She shoved the rolling tank into the elevator car and turned back to them as the doors closed behind her.

“Young lady—” Ernie scolded, struggling to right his specs.

“We have to go !” Kiara dragged Isaiah and Ernie from the lobby despite the old man’s protests. The trio hustled and knocked into each other as she rushed them across the grass, Kiara all but lifting Isaiah off the ground.

Other residents stood on the lawn, frowning at the building or at their phones, unsure of what to do next. Isaiah saw Jayden wave to them from the mailbox on the sidewalk, but that was still a ways away. They weren’t at the street yet.

Kiara flailed her arms and hollered at her neighbors, “There’s a gas leak! Get back, get away from the building! That smell is gas .”

“It’s what?”

“A g—”

KA-BOOM!

The force of the explosion hit them like a truck, hurling them to the ground.

A white-hot fireball tore through the building, blowing the doors and windows out at once, roaring in fury.

The intense heat made the world around them wobble and glimmer, and searing crumbs of glass rained from the sky, burning their skin as they shielded themselves.

Isaiah squeezed his eyes shut as his sister’s body covered his and pressed him into the grass and grit. He smelled the noxious smoke mixed with the smell of burned flesh and hair, so strong he could taste it. It made him want to gag.

The only sensation missing was sound. The blast had knocked a fuzzy blankness into Isaiah’s ears like cotton.

Slowly at first, then all at once, the noise came back.

Car alarms wailed. People screamed and yelled.

And the raging fire roared, cracked, hissed, and whooshed through the building as it devoured their homes.

At last his sister’s voice cut through the ringing in his ears. “You okay, Isaiah, are you okay?”

Isaiah turned his head to the side to free his mouth to reply, but his throat was too scratchy.

He saw Ernie lying on his side, his glasses off, grimacing and breathing hard, but alive.

All around them, the ground was covered in debris: glass, gray dust, splintered wood, a hunk of couch smoking like an asteroid.

Their homes were blown to smithereens.

But with instinct, luck, and each other, they survived.

And they would never forget the smell.