“Our cove.” I looked out past his pointing finger. “Then one day, looking out this very window, I realized our salvation. He guided me to the window and gestured toward the sea. And there was no good way, then or now, for a woman to make a fortune in this narrow-minded country.” Your mother and I didn’t know what to do. Before you were born, child, the orange groves were filled with weeds. There weren’t the funds to keep up the grounds or pay the staff. By the time they died, we had far more property than wealth. But they did not work, and the fortunes dwindled with age. He and Edmond, his business partner, had been running a smuggling business since before I was born and my mother had died. Like blue, only less so.Ī deep note of rot mixes with the sterile cleanliness of saline, and the result, a mottle of clear and foam, smells so much like itself that an old woman who hasn’t smelled it in years, living in a desert town with no water at all, an uncrossable distance from the sea, smelling it faint on the breeze will stop and be cast back to her life on an estate by the sea, and for her, it will smell like her childhood. Like winds from the inland carrying the hot circulation of life and winds from the ocean carrying the distant froth of waves against ships and islands. Like every creature who has ever lived in it, a churning graveyard and nursery. The sea smells like old wood and wet leaves. I don’t know how I know this is true, but I know it is true. We feel moisture as life and so the smells of the ocean are layered upon the content- ment of the water. Water has no smell but instead a comfort. Salt has no smell, but makes the air sting, and so all of the other smells of the sea are layered upon the pang of salt. It is more texture than scent, because the sea is primarily made of two substances that have no smell of their own: water and salt. Everybody knows of the Faceless Old Woman who Secretly Lives in Your Home, but nobody knows where she came from. The creators of the hit Welcome to Night Vale podcast have released their second novel exploring the history of the spooky town. The following is an exclusive excerpt from The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home, by Jeffrey Cranor and Joseph Fink.
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