Her father, Amos, was a sickening mixture of green, purple, yellow, and black. Yellow was good in things, but not in people neither was green, or at least some shades of it. Her mother, Renee, had a dark, spicy red scent, with a few sworls of black and yellow, but the spicy red almost crowded out all the other colors. Colors didn’t mean the same in people smells that they did in thing smells. The smell of things was easy to color in her mind the color scent of people was more difficult, because people were never just one thing, but different colors mixed together. Grapefruit smelled bright yellow she’d never eaten one, but once had picked up one in the grocery store and hesitantly sniffed its skin, and the scent had exploded on her taste buds, sour and sweet all at the same time. Of course the earth smelled brown of course that fresh, tangy scent of leaves would be green in her mind. Most of the colors were obvious, drawn from the way something looked. Odors had color for Faith Devlin, and since she’d been a little girl she had entertained herself by coloring the smells around her.

The hot, humid summer air was redolent with the pink sweetness of honeysuckle nectar, all mingled with the rich, brown odor of the earth and rotting vegetation as well as the crisp green scent of the leaves.

It was late in the afternoon, the sun throwing long shadows when it could manage to break through the thick woods, but for the most part the translucent golden light was tangled in the tops of the trees, leaving the forest floor mysteriously shadowed.

After the night by linda howard