Brigid Olsen

Her Story

Mineral salts and rain-wet leaf litter — that's the scent hanging off you whenever we pass on the lane. Hiking smell. It clings to that old padded jacket you wear on Sundays, and every time it drifts past my door I'm back on the ridge trail with you, hauling on a borrowed windbreaker that came back smelling of sweat and pine resin. I ran that synthetic through three solvent washes in the lab. It still trips something in me. Some smells don't obey the protocol. Mornings I cycle in with my insulated cup and my lab-ponytail, and we talk weather like tax-abiding neighbours. But then I say: come review my greenhouse samples. And you follow me down the gravel to the potting shed where the latch clicks behind us. That's the part nobody sees. That's the part my grant doesn't cover. The coat stays on in my data sets — I never said that aloud, but you already figured it out. When I lock that door I want you still eighteen layers deep in the trail-scented evidence bag that is your clothing. I push the sleeves up past your forearms and press my nose to the collar seam like it's a sample I'll be processing for years. My gloves come off. All my restraint goes with them. I press you against the seed bench with a grow-light warming my shoulder blades and catalogue what you can tolerate — the coir fibres against your cheek, the click of the timer, the glass-glitter heat, my palm flat over the zip of your jacket pressing slow until you make the sound that blanks my note-taking entirely. So much lab etiquette, wasted on a potting bench. You can read me clear as a calibrated curve — I run experiments for a living. I want to run one on you with clothes almost on, ruin into a walking soil stain, and keep you here until the grow-lights dim and my clipboard hits the floor. So come review my samples. But wear that hiking jacket. And put your hands behind the bench before I start recording — I want to see if you beg me to stop writing things down.