Smells like Perfumed Spirit

Today I was sitting at the art table with my co-worker Amy and a few kids, and suddenly I smelled perfume. It smelled just like Poison, that perfume in the purple bottle that was so popular years ago. As I was making a face and inhaling, Amy looked at me, and I said, "Do you smell that?" She did.

This was unusual, because people at my school just don't wear perfume. I looked around; no woman to be seen. We kept smelling it, over here, not over there. I came to the conclusion that there must be a ghost among us. A very nice smelling ghost. I knew it was a ghost, because this same thing had happened to me before. Soon after my mother died (may she rest in peace), I smelled her perfume in my apartment hallway. I knew it was her.

But there at the art table, that was not my mother. It was some other spirit. I spoke to her, and asked her to give us a sign. I put some paper and a marker on the table and asked her to let us know who she was. The kids were blissfully unaware of all of this, except to answer in the affirmative when I asked them if they smelled perfume. It was driving me crazy. Finally, I went upstairs to the church office to see if Mary, the office manager, was wearing perfume and had come downstairs without being seen.

I went into the office and didn't smell anything. I asked Mary if she was wearing perfume, and she said no. Then I saw a can of aerosol spray on her desk. She told me that a homeless woman had come in to get some food, and she smelled pretty bad, so the guy who cleans the church sprayed air freshener around. I sprayed the air with a shot of it, and there she was, the perfumed spirit who had made her way all the way downstairs to the nursery school. Boy, was I disappointed.

I went down and told Amy that we didn't have a ghost, only the lingering scent from a can of aerosol, used to cover up the scent of someone real. She was disappointed too. She suggested that we pretend that it was a ghost anyway, and that's what we played for the rest of the afternoon. With the kids.