Janna just returned home from a long business trip and the least thing about her I thought I’d miss was the first thing about her I missed most: The smell of her skin. Whenever we embrace or pass by each other there is the faint smell of human emotion, perfume and sweat mixing in the air between us.

I love kissing the soft path where her hairline meets her forehead and even if she isnt with me I can close my eyes and breathe her in again with the memory of that intoxicating brew of pheromones and promises.

Smell is memory and it reeks from lust and of ancient attics. Smell is the attacking sense and it wafts among the history of dangerous moments and insidious sin. There — floating on face and falling into bosom — tracked by tendrils of thought and electrified by sensation and fever, is the battlefield inspiration men have used across centuries of human sorrow to slay enemies into conquering graves and to thwart evil into heroic darkness.

The promised aroma of victory mingling in the meadows homeward has been tendered and waits for the inhaling.