Inspired by Charles Baudelaire’s prose poem THE DOG AND THE VIAL.

BACK TO THE SPLEEN?

You enjoy your job. Most days. Don’t you? Even though, sometimes, you wonder if you’re just like Baudelaire’s dog now, forever distracted by the foul smells of the city, your senses numbed by its eternal spleen.

Would you be able to detect the scent of honest magic if it crawled up your nostrils and smacked you in the brain? You fear you might not. You can smell the otherness all right. You’re paid good money to follow the eerie stench of the preternatural and sniff out the otherworldly.

You’re good at it, too. A selkie hiding with a riot of fishwives by the harbor, a werewolf buried under blankets of offal behind some illegal abattoir – neither is a challenge for your nose.

The nose, like you enjoy repeating, has a sight of its own. It detects what the light cannot show. The nose can’t easily be tricked. At least, not yours.

And, yes, you can also smell the dread in those creatures when your page cries out to the guards that inevitably follow you in these quests: “Here! Here! Master says it’s here!”

What happens next is none of your business. The Torquemadas of the world are not your bosses; the citizens are. They’ve elected you, again and again, to play this part. To be their nose. To be the one who makes them feel safe at night, inside their tiny, smelly houses. MPASE - Master Protector Against Secret Evils. Master Sniffer behind your back. Just Sniff, when they think you can’t hear them.

Still, it is a good job. Better than many. You do enjoy it. Most days.

Today, however, something is happening. You’re smelling something you’ve never encountered before. Not magic. Not exactly. Yet, so powerful it almost gives you vertigo.

It’s the smell of a promise. Of home. A home you’ve never had. A bed you’ve never shared. A warmth you’ve never imagined possible. And light. So much impossible light. You forget to breathe.

Maybe it is magic. Untenable. An illusion, perhaps, because it vanishes almost as suddenly as it overwhelms you.

And yet, she was there, you’re sure of it, almost close enough to be touched, one moment ago.

“That woman,” you say, arm outreached toward the emptiness where she had stood. “Did you see her, boy? There, boy!” you snarl. “She was standing right there!”

“No, Master,” the boy answers, with the thin voice of fear. “I’m so sorry, Master. I wasn’t looking.”

Taming your temper, you place a hand on his shoulder as if to say, “Not your fault, boy.”

You wish you could describe that woman to your page, tell him what she looks like besides her fragrant, unfathomable promises. But you can’t, of course. You’re just a blind man with a great nose for spotting magic.

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©2026 CE

Link to THE DOG AND THE VIAL by Charles Baudelaire:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/47032/47032-h/47032-h.htm#Page_64