128 [Ca(ClO)2]
For Tuesday, May 7: Day 128 of the 2024 Story-a-Day Challenge
The chlorine smell ignites my forebrain.
Olfactory receptors fill; sensory waves coalesce into breakers, plunging me into an ocean of childhood. We adults scuttle our dry feet away from life's flow, but seldom follow its ebb. Children aren't afraid to get their feet wet.
Now I invite immersion.
My olfactory bulb explodes with data, swamping my hippocampus, where memories were documented, filed, and categorized decades ago. Smells entangle with wet feet slapping pavement toward pool steps. The memory absorbs sounds of mayhem--cacophony--shrill-voiced ululations of pseudo-terrified exaltations.
Calcium oxychloride disassociates. Unstable calcium and hypochlorite ions, freed by water, waft in with its characteristic smell. Like lining up the tumblers of the lock that is my limbic system, carefree childhood memories, unbridled, escape and devour my sensible, responsible adulthood, to relive my life lived as a cartoon.
My first cranial nerve, exchanging sodium for potassium, synapses: sodium ions enter and potassium ions leave, crossing the membrane whose voltage changes drastically.
By which, I remember.
More than that, I re-live. Re-am. All life's years collapse into a singularity of who I was, am, and will become.
The smell of chlorine, thereby, gatecrashes my amygdala, exploding with emotion. The route of propagated impulses is as short as it is direct. Calcium hypochlorite lifts me into an out-of-body experience of summer poolside horseplay, belly-busters, and face-splashing.
And I can still smell each splash! Fun has a smell.
Nerve conduction hijacks recollections, selectively rewriting my memoirs. Revised, they're etched in arrears, written--over the head of a childhood's ability to savor such moments at the time, in real time, by someone who can fully appreciate them now.
Poolside, I inhale deeply and taste my child, relive childhood snapshots, and find happiness under the lock and key of biochemistry.
My ancestors evolved for millennia, wrapping higher-order convolutions of gray matter around my primitive mind, gyri that hardly gyrate as mirthfully as the child who lies beneath, ready to laugh.
Ready to play.
I walk wet pavement; I slip, falling back, hitting my head.
"You better get that checked," someone says.
My child gets snatched away, a passing train's descending Doppler decrescendo. I re-enter adulthood, wondering if I paid my medical insurance premium this month.
__________
CELEBRATING MY BREAKING THE 3,000 SEAL!
For Tuesday, May 7, Day 128 of the Story-a-Day Challenge.
366 WORDS (without A/N)
All pictures are AI-generated, but the chlorine is not!
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There are currently three Vocal creators still participating in the 2024 Story-a-Day Challenge:
• L.C. Schäfer, challenge originator
• Rachel Deeming
• Gerard DiLeo (some other guy)
PLEASE SUPPORT THEM BY READING THEIR DAILY SUBMISSIONS
About the Creator
Gerard DiLeo
Retired, not tired. In Life Phase II: Living and writing from a decommissioned church in Hull, MA. (Phase I was New Orleans and everything that entails. Hippocampus, behave!
https://www.amazon.com/Gerard-DiLeo/e/B00JE6LL2W/
Keep reading
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Comments (6)
Oh no, that's so sad. Talk about reality hitting him hard. Loved your story!
This narrative creatively weaves sensory experiences with poignant reflections on childhood, through the powers of scent and memory. Gerard, you've captured the essence of carefree youth. Through the vivid imagery, I couldn't help but to feel like I was in the moment experiencing everything you described and such fantastic detail.
The story also reminds me of my childhood, but in a different way. Calcium chloro hypochlorite is commonly known as bleaching powder. I used to hate its smell. My father used it to control the growth of algae and mosses beside the pond! The story is really primitive in terms of locomotion between the olfactory nerve and the olfactory lobe
You swim gracefully between brain and mind, past and present, innocent play and worldly woe in this excellent story. Those wet, slapping feet are especially evocative!
I haven't been to a pool in years, but that chlorine smell is embedded. Well done!
This really well done! Written like a biochemist and neuroscientist with a unusually healthy dose of childlike grasp for what truly matters. Quantum entanglement to this delight? You are astonishingly versatile!