ROSE MONOTONE

Rose • Lychee • Chrome • Cellophane

Claire Liégent isolates rose oxide and freezes the rest of the bouquet out. What you wear is a flower with the singing scraped off it. Brazilian pink pepper bites cold in the first breath, then a cellophane accord crinkles against it, glassy. Peruvian ambrette stiffens in like cotton pulled off a winter line. Beneath the rose, the lychee stays chilled the way a steel counter keeps the cold of a room before anyone enters it at seven. By mid-morning the flower has not loosened a petal. Haitian vetiver and ambroxan glaze a thin chrome wire under all of it, and the rose keeps its angle without one warm minute. Wear it on a station platform where the light goes flat and northern.

You will take it to the flower market before the city wakes, into the refrigerated hall where roses are graded under white light. Buyers drift between trestle tables; every stem is sleeved in plastic; the air smells of cold water rather than perfume. You fit there. On your skin the rose reads exact and unsentimental, a specimen labelled rather than a bouquet given, and when you step back onto the street the lychee trails after you, clean as a printed receipt.