Appealing to the Senses

[Yui-chan]

"Mama..." The plaintive little cry whispered forth from the cold air, appearing from nothing like the white cloud of her frozen breath. "Mama, I've been waiting for you..."

 

Until that moment, she had been alone, but the sweet voice shifted everything, wrapped the world in unreality and changed it seamlessly, instantly. She turned her head with a loving smile, glancing down at something only she could see.

 

"I'm here, sweetling," she whispered back, holding out a frail-boned hand to the whispering air and wrapping her fingers around nothingness, her mind filled with the touch of soft, silken skin and the pressure of small fingers gripping her palm. Her dulled gaze hovered over snow-dotted ground and winter chill, but she saw flaxen curls and deep, brown eyes, their luminous depths filled with uncertain hope.

 

The child - her child... it didn't matter that she'd never given birth. "I'm here. There's nothing for you to fear, any more."

[Quincunx]

I love the scents of men: spice-men who make my nose tingle and invariably have fine, floating hair; clean-men so well scrubbed that I can't even taste soap residue, strange and bland but they make fine accessories; smoke-men, not smokers, but the ones I can always smell coming no matter how freshly they've showered--both aromatic wood smoke and stinking garbage smoke; animal-men who have lived with nature for so long that their odor has merged with the odor of their chosen companion. I do not, however, love the onion-men. Certainly they can't help smelling like vegetables, and it's not their fault that I'm akin to them--the attraction of scent is only meant to bring us closer to people with different antibodies, and I'm quite immune to vegetables already, thankee.

 

Me? I'm a walnut woman. My skin smells like walnut husks on all the outward parts, the weather-exposed parts, even though I'm not a nature lover. The wetter parts seem bitter to me, more like the tough walls within the walnuts themselves, but no one else has complained about it. The walnuts haven't gotten into my hair though: it might look like dark-stained walnut-wood planking, but it smells like rain. Not a good, healthy forest sprinkle--a miserable slow drip onto pavement, the kind which clings like oil and makes people step out into traffic in the hope of a speeding car--that's the rain which has soaked into my hair. Nobody is going to write odes about my hair. Most of the time, most of the fantasies men have, it's a shining wavy wall that you'd have to part in order to see my backside, but that part of the fantasy wavers and dies whenever they get close enough to smell it. Then they look at me with disappointment. Why? I already haven't got a body to call my own, true, unchanging self, and now they want me to give up my scent, too?

 

--Tzimfemme, the naked mage

[Sweetcherrie]

“I will try the fog,” Rhiannon said and closed her eyes again. This time she imagined the microscopic particles of water in the air to flow together, and she even used water from the air beyond the forest.

When she opened her eyes she couldn’t see Kevin, who was standing right next to her. The fog was so dense that she could almost taste it, and she felt it tighten around her like a damp coat. She touched Kevin’s hand and was comforted that he was there.

 

“Heeellooooo! Where are you?” Trey’s voice came through the mist, it sounded far away, hushed by the fog.

“Auuw!” was the next thing they heard.

“Just do the opposite of what you did before” Kevin said, even his voice sounded muffled.

Rhiannon shut her eyes and she ordered the water to go back where it had come from. She opened her eyes and discovered that Trey was on the floor at the foot of the tree that he had obviously walked into. He was only about 10 feet away.

 

(hope this qualifies)

[Ayshela]

one thing i love about exercises of this sort - you all come up with such wonderful examples! =)