See here, o ye wistful, see here! The sweat of God, bottled. Collected from His pits. A drop grants salvation. Smell here, o ye damned! Open thy nostrils, thou wretch, smell the funk of divinity! Animalic, if you know your fragrances. Pungent, still just as strong, as if He hung, dying, in front of you. Half empty. It doesn’t stand up. Cobalt blue Roman glass, amphoric unguentarium. Misidentified by thrift stores over the centuries. Tagged for six dollars at a Salvation Army in Idaho. It was sealed shut with lead before the Enlightenment, gathered dust through Modernism in someone’s great-grandma’s attic, passed down, sold at estate sale, now here. Still sealed.
Glory to the Most High. The local monsignor. He swings through the thrift shop, packing his pipe tobacco. Eyeballs the shop assistant, a lost lamb, he thinks, what’s her name? Isabelle. The shop assistant, Isaac, who has exulted himself, has been on T for six weeks. The monsignor considers pipes and bypasses the relic, not even a flicker in his eye, no inkling of the opportunity to know God. That weekend Isaac, a collector, will buy the bottle, with employee discount, layer the body excretions of Jesus with two spritzes of Tom Ford, and smell as he is: Divine.
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Alice M.’s short fiction has appeared in Salt‘s Best British Short Stories, and a few literary journals, including hex. Ae are a fiction editor at X-R-A-Y, and have a novella coming from Jillian Luft’s Sweet Trash Press, an imprint of House of Vlad, in 2026. Find Alice on substack, insta, bluesky, or the wasteland which used to be twitter, all @notveryalice