"Pheromones" by Maud Casey

Photo by Nicolette Polek

Maud Casey is the author of four novels, most recently City of Incurable Women; a short story collection, Drastic; and a nonfiction book, The Art of Mystery: The Search for Questions. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Washington Post Book World, Salon, Poets and Writers, A Public Space and Literary Imagination. She is the recipient of the Italo Calvino Prize, the St. Francis College Literary Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in Washington, D.C., and teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Maryland.

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Madelyn Smith is a senior at American University in Washington, D.C. She is majoring in psychology with a minor in literature. She spent her life traveling between Baltimore, Maryland and Wallingford,Vermont and is grateful for the diverse experiences the two homes have granted her. In her free time she likes to read memoirs and short story collections, to write her own short stories, and to spend time in the library tucked away in a cozy corner. 

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Introduction to "Pheromones" 
By Madelyn Smith

"Pheromones" will draw you in. You don't always know when, why, or how, but they silently invoke a sense of yearning. That's what happens with Maud Casey's short story “Pheromones”. You're transported into a dictionary definition and then further drawn in by the scents and sounds of the world within this example.

Casey's latest book, The City of Incurable Women, includes photographs. In some of her other works, like “Pheromones”, the supporting works are less direct, such as references to music or graphic scents that lift off the page. 

​In a 2018 article on the platform Largehearted Boy that explores the overlap between literature and music, Casey wrote about her book The Art of Mystery. In the Book Note series, where authors create playlists to go along with their work, Casey includes a few words about each song she added.

I was specifically interested in the Led Zeppelin song Casey included on this playlist, considering how heavily Zeppelin is referenced in “Pheromones”. She writes, "When I was fifteen, I fell asleep to this song every night." about Zeppelin's song Over the Hills and Far Away. 

In “Pheromones”, readers are brought back to a time of pubescence. Considering Casey's own connection to her youth and the music of Zeppelin, it makes sense she would include their music as a part of this story. Casey writes about girls getting their first periods, friends rubbing their armpits together as an attempt to sync their cycles, and boys bragging about the explicit 'pussy fingers.' The world around these kids is filled with smells like cinnamon gum, fresh dirt, overripe bananas, and chewing tobacco and filled with the sounds of AC/DC and Led Zeppelin. Casey writes a story you can smell, hear, and feel, but most of the power of this story is in the unseeable. 
 
Casey talks about her love for mystery in her 2020 interview with New England Review's Sabrina Islam. Casey said, "the seduction of the in-between, what isn't visible, the world behind the world—that's where it's at for me." She spoke about her story, The City Itself, published in New England Review Vol. 41, No. 1, but this quote also strengthens the basis of “Pheromones”. It's a story all about the power of the invisible.

“Pheromones” begins its definition of "pheromones" with the phonetic pronunciations, derivatives, and three examples of the word. This structure appears as if the story has been lifted right from a dictionary. When interviewing Casey, I asked about what could begin forming a story like “Pheromones”, "I think I went first to the dictionary," she writes. A simple enough place to start that leads to many other thoughts, and as always, personal experience seeps into nearly every piece of writing we do. She writes that it is in part about "...the effort to control something as uncontrollable as the body and its desires.". In “Pheromones”, the third example under the definition is where the story takes place. Example three continues, "(Pheromones)...Were hanging heavy in the air that summer…" The entire ambiance of this story of youth, innocence, and nostalgia is formed through this clever structural choice. 

The first definition of "pheromones" references Star Trek and the second Giantman. These choices give us timely cultural context before our true story has even begun. By the third example, readers can see the poster of Farrah Fawcett in her red bathing suit hung in the teenage boys' room or the episodes of Love Boat and Fantasy Island the girls watch. It is lighthearted, playful, and nostalgic. We are in a time that is free of social media and the constraints of today's world and can view this time with fondness. Fondness for some aspects and sympathy for others, like our main character Myrna.

Myrna is a young girl grappling with change. Her body is changing, her friends are changing, and she’s processing the world around her in more meaningful ways. When her friend's brother and his friend Red take notice of Myrna and her friend, the boys share the smell of their pussy fingers, and a whole new world is opened up. They've smelled sex for the first time. "The smell of electricity…of mystery… and fate," and it invokes, in a sense, a sexual awakening.

Casey writes about how one may experience and navigate these new invisible draws. In reading “Pheromones”, you will have not only a mental but physical experience. “Pheromones” gives you a glimpse into the past you didn't know you needed. With strong characters, specific smells, and colorful visuals, Casey has built this little world within the definition that is the perfect example of pheromones at play. 

In the final scene, immediately after the girls are subjected to the smell of the boys' fingers, we follow Myrna, who goes to the library to look up the strange instrument the boys referenced the night before when listening to a Zeppelin album, "That's Page playing a theremin, man," Mike said.". We learn a lot about Myrna in this final scene. She's the type of person to go look something up if she doesn't know about it. Like the word pheromones, the story is pulled right from the very same dictionary. We can picture ourselves in her position, as the ones reading this definition in a large dusty, old book at the library.

Casey relates the "invisible chemical yearning" these kids are experiencing to the instrument the theremin. The last glimpse readers have into this clever vignette is Myrna's mind soaring while reading about the theremin, focused on the picture in the book, and imagining the sound she had heard the night before. At this moment, Myrna understands that sometimes invisible things are powerful, and that's precisely what the new pheromones in her life have been. In reading “Pheromones”, you may notice the same "electrified air" and "invisible, chemical yearning taking shape all around…" as Myrna did. 

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Check out more of Maud Casey's work, including her book City of Incurable Women, on her website.

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