Page 19 of Wayfarers

It was a smell that was unwelcome

around my new family; they would gripe

about the lab-made tang; they would tell me

mass-produced soaps only disrupt the skin’s native flora

and that our bodies don’t need soap, which is when,

by the way, I first learned that adults lied.

They prized a narrow kind

of individuality. You were allowed

to be different exactly like everyone else.

So bland oatmeal goat-milk soap it was,

until now. I walked to the campground showers

clutching the waxy, green-and-white marbled smoothness

of the bar of Irish Spring, running my thumb

over the letters inscribed on its surface

like a monument to cleanness.

I wanted to scrub the grime

of my old life from me and be reborn

into my new one, fragranced like cut grass and water

that percolates up through mossy rocks, the way

ancient people sent their royalty to the afterlife

perfumed with precious myrrh and resins.

And what would I do after, with my life?

Good question.

Sylvie

“Are these the showers?”

“Yeah,” he says, his hair wet. “These are the showers.”

Knox

“Hey, I saw you earlier,” I say, turning.

“Oh yeah?” the Girl says. “You sure it was me?”

“Hundred percent. And the first thing I thought when I saw you was how interesting you look; how much I’d like to get to know you. All the more so now that I find myself suddenly awfully lonely and trying to think through my next moves as it sets in how much more planning I maybe should have done before making what turned out to be an impulsive decision. Wanna come hang out with me by my campfire and share one of my three dented cans of Dinty Moore beef stew from the same Meijer dumpster my birthday cake came from so I have some beautiful way to forget, at least for a while, the bind I’ve gotten myself into? As a bonus, right now is the best I’ve smelled in, oh, eleven years or thereabout, so I have that going for me. What do you say?”