The girl remembers her mother's smell. Floral and sweet, but not cloying. Bright, and yet, a hint of something darker. Earthy. A spice of some kind, perhaps?
She imagines it smells like earth or the forest after rain. Like the promise of decay; of life waiting just beneath the soil, rejoicing at leaves falling as others look on in mourning.
This is all her imagination, of course. She's never seen a real forest, let alone smelt one after a rainstorm. She's never felt the air, thick with water and bugs as it carries the remains of birds' nests in its breath. She's never stood in a forest, thick with trees; only gazed at the projected immersion screens on Thursdays after dimming.
She makes a point to go, though. As often as she's awake and able.
Usually, she'll dust off her melancholia and haze for an hour, just long enough to navigate the pristine carbon corridors winding between her room and the barren, plastic pod she pretends is hers; set her usual scent programme - daisies, damp earth, and cinnamon - and float.
She'll drift, stare at the trees as they stare back, and mourn the life she might've had if her mother had lived.
As a child, she was joyful. With short pudgy fingers and a crooked front tooth, her eyes, framed by thick lashes, shone bright with mischief.
Her hair, big as a sun and soft as a cloud when left to its own devices, was always neatly plaited. Her mother would spend hours, washing and detangling, snaring and swallowing the black plastic teeth in her wild coils, before parting it into tidy, equal sections.
Shaking her head, she would open her knees and tap the floor with a socked foot. That was the signal. After running off for the third time that afternoon, the time had come to sit down again. She would run over and plop herself down, crossing her thick ankles as she sank.
The girl always came when her mother called.
With kind eyes and hard hands, her mother would hum along to the melodies drifting form the ancient record player in the corner. All the while, the girl would talk.
Buzzing with the endless vitality and curiosity of youth, she could fill any silence. Give her a word or a topic and, like a can all shaken up, it was all the world could do to watch as she spilled over. She could rattle off facts gleaned from the tattered textbooks and encyclopedias her mother had painstakingly carried and cared for over so many miles. She could relay conversation snippets and translate shreds of discarded speech picked up on her daily walks because her mother said exercise was important. Exercise keeps your brain happy, and happy brains learn better, her mother said. She could quote lines of poetry she'd read aloud from her father's collection and exclaim that she liked how the sounds slid and popped on her tongue, even if she didn't quite understand what they meant yet.
She knew she'd get it eventually, she just needed to grow up a bit first.
So, the girl would talk about whatever had interested her that day; her mother would hum; the records would spin in their deck; and the mother would weave the hair of her daughter into intricate fractals. Plucking at knots and snarls with deft fingers, she twisted strands into tight tessellated plaits that bent and bowed in the rivers of her daughter's scalp, still soft with youth.
After a few short hours, the girl would uncross her ankles and raise herself up on stiff legs. Her mother would stand too, knees clicking, and hold out her hand - fingers puckered with grease, wrists stiff from overuse.
'Come, girl, let's dance.' Together, they'd shake off the stiffness of a day spent bent double, and dance until her father came home.
He'd throw open the door, bouncing his shoulders as he shimmied toward them. He'd pull the little girl up on his shoulders and ask, 'how does the world look from up there, my dear girl?'
Back, she'd sing, 'small, Papa. And all mine!'
They'd laugh and sing and swing each other around until the mealtime tone sounded in the tinny apartment speakers, signalling their expected exit. And then, limbs stiff and cheeks sore, they'd head to the hall and eat their rationed fill, weary after their long day of day of laughter.
Blinking, the girl swipes away the moisture on her cheeks and scrubs a hand across her scalp, shorn and uneven. Coarse tufts cower in the awkward angles unseen by the mirror. She breathes deeply, trying and failing to find a trace of her mother in the sweet, synthesised scent mix that she can never get quite right.
Turning to face the opposite wall, she turns, searching for something - some evidence of life, perhaps - in the pod's shadowed, spotless corners.
She hates change. She likes things she can count on; things she can touch, feel, see. Things that don't slide under her hand as she reaches, fingers stretching and spreading to grasp its edges.
The girl was five when she lost her first tooth. Lina, a girl in her class who always wore pink bows to hold her perfect ringlets, was the first to do everything. She had a giggle that positively tinkled. Everybody loved her the most because she was the best. The first, the fastest, the brightest, the prettiest. The best.
Lina, of course, lost her first baby tooth some months before. That morning, the stout, soft angel, waltzed through the door. Her cheeks split wide gaping to fit the grin that stole the bottom half of her face. Instead of a hello, Lina jammed her fingers - strangely slender for a girl of her age - into the seam of her lips and pulled. Pulling back her mouth into a sharklike grin, Lina showed off her freshly exposed gum and new gap.
When the girl - destined, it seemed, to be left behind - finally lost a tooth months later, after the fanfare had well and truly worn off, she cried. She whined and blubbered and bawled, and her new crooked adult tooth caught on her lip awkwardly, the nub strangely large and out of place in her round, full-cheeked face.
The girl hates change. But she thinks, standing in the blank room filled only by false scents and fading memories, she hates this, this, this nothing, even more.