By: Brian Scott

The first thing Katrin did was announce herself.

She did it in the foyer outside the men’s room, the moment Martin and I brushed shoulders: a sweetness with a skin on it, like warm milk left standing.

“Is that you, or me?” Martin asked, sniffing his lapel.

“Neither. It’s Katrin.”

“Who’s Katrin?”

I laughed. He wasn’t joking.

“A brand. The new restroom accessories: soap, towels, bins. The intranet says it’s in airports, hotels, care homes, and designed to reassure.”

“Reassure,” Martin said. He hadn’t sounded reassured since April, when he started leaving at five to sit with his father.

He pushed open the restroom door and the smell thickened. I looked in over his shoulder: nobody, dry floor, open stalls. It came off the white dispensers stamped KATRIN, off the bin, its lid clamped like a held breath, and filled the room brim-high, like a bath.

Martin held his hands under the dryer. It roared awake, pushing warm air into the foyer, and the scent turned over. The sweetness thinned. Underneath: radiator dust, talc, the inside of a slipper; then skin, powdered, kept indoors too long.

He came out with a paper towel pressed to his face. When he lowered it, he looked younger and more tired at once.

“Katrin,” he said, like the name of someone he used to know.

“You know it?”

“Not from here.”

He folded the towel into his breast pocket and went back in. The dryer started, stopped, started again.
An hour later, at my desk, I turned my head and found it on my shoulder, the one that had brushed his. It had been on Martin since April. I’d assumed that was just how he smelled.

Katrin hadn’t announced herself. She had only given it a name.

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Brian Scott (he/him) is an American-Dutch writer of microfiction, flash fiction, and short fiction, based in Zeist, the Netherlands. His work lingers in the small, ordinary moments where the familiar turns strange: a scent, a sound, a road home that leads somewhere else. His characters reach for memory, desire, and belonging, and find them changed. His fiction is forthcoming in QalamKar.