Flanker

BY VIVIAN MEDITHI

We're on one side of the booth at the second bar on the third drink, 45 minutes past 11 PM on a Wednesday and you smell so good I could bite through your neck like red velvet cheesecake. Actually you smell like candied ginger and condensed milk, pimento and latexy tuberose. Every year the Big 7 put out an army of flankers, faceless battalions warring over Shanghai and Milan, 5th Ave, Rodeo Drive. L'Interdit Rouge among them like Heracles sacking Troy (Flipo, Ropion & Bal playacting as Alcmene). It's been 60 years since Hepburn relented and let Hubert sell the original, now reformulated and reformulated. IFRA regulations, corporate nickles and dimes. Anything for a quick buck right now. But right here, post-cigarette (L. Turin: "The carbon monoxide [blocks] cytochrome P450") – I don't know anything but subclavian heat and the vertical blinds of your hair.

Vivian Medithi is an Iowa-via-NYC writer. His favorite perfumers are Liza Pittard and Olivia Giacobetti.