No Pistachio.

Once upon a summer, long ago, I was in a city I didn't know. The streets were cobbled and mazy, and wound around tall buildings of ramshackle stone and shuttered windows. Washing lines hung between them like children's cup-and-string telephones. Sun baked the red roofs and bathed narrow alleys in dark shade. Old woman watered geraniums on high windowsills; down below, children played in the brief splashes of earthy rain. Cats grazed along walls like shadows, or slept in the sun.

I'd spent the day wandering these winding streets, sitting in the sudden sunlit squares I happened upon, dipping my fingers in greenish fountains; peering into shop windows and seeing myself stare back. Stroking strange dogs and smiling at their owners. The afternoon drew on, and the heat lingered like sweet syrup resting at the bottom of a glass. I was weary, hot, and dusty. My thirst prickled. I was lost, though intentionally so. I had wandered the labyrinth with no yarn, and was glad of it.

It was at that moment that I found it. I doubt I could find it again, if I went back to that city one day.
A small shop, whose wooden shop front was perhaps once the blue-green of a duck's egg, but was now sun-faded to the hue of the sky, late on a winter's afternoon. The letters had long been bleached from the sign, though I could see the last flakes of gold paint left behind. The sun rained down on my shoulders, and heated my hair like wire filaments. I stepped into the cool shop and shrugged the heat off my back like a jacket.

The door rang a little bell and the shopkeeper looked up, smiling. An old man in a cream shirt and a red striped waistcoat. His mop of white hair stood out all over it like a dandelion. In front of him was a long glass counter. Displayed under it was ice-cream. Tub after tub, ice-cream in all colours, piled high in swirling peaks. I approached the glass and peered into it, hoping for pistachio. Or hazelnut, or perhaps a mango sorbet. But none of the ice-cream had labels, and from the colours, I couldn't quite tell.

The shopkeeper was grinning as he watched me. He asked me which flavour I would like, and I said, what have you got? And he grinned even wider. I think I know what you'd like, he said. And he took one of those little wooden ice-cream spoons and scooped a bit of ice-cream onto it. Here. The ice-cream on the spoon was a very pale green. Pistachio, perhaps? How did he know? But when I put it into my mouth, it was not the  flavour that I was expecting.

My whole mouth was filled with the taste of freshly cut grass. The taste of the smell, I should say. The smell of grass, just mown, damp from a sprinkler, now warming in the sun. I looked back at the shopkeeper and he was still grinning, expectantly. Yes, I said, I like that very much. What else do you have?

The next spoonful was white. It tasted ever so slightly salty. And of something sweet and perfumed. Suncream, and the ocean. Licking the salt water off suncreamy lips. Seeing my face light up, he handed me another spoon. It was orange. It filled my mouth with autumn. Wood smoke, the scent that rises from piles of fallen leaves, freshly opened conkers, cold pumpkin pulp.

After that I was hooked. He gave me spoons of cool, dark churches, of warm asphalt being kissed by rain. Hookah smoke and leather satchels, copper coins and the back of stamps. The smell of the cinema; popcorn, sticky puddles of spilt cola, dusty velvet seats. The smell of birthdays; cake, party poppers and wax candles. I tasted spoons of petrol fumes, marijuana, pine forests. Melting butter.The smell of babies heads and mothers' embraces. The smell of clean, white sheets.

Then, he said, he'd found my favourite. I paid him, and he piled a cone high with creamy white scoops.
I thanked him, promised to return, and left, carrying my cone out into the heat like an Olympic torch.

I walked down a couple of streets and sat down on a bench. The sun, though starting to lower in the sky, was still burning down heavily. I licked a drip of ice-cream that had trickled onto my hand. It tasted cool and slightly stale. The taste of a big old library. And it tasted of books. Old books, new books. The scent of their breath as their pages flip past your nose. Shelves and shelves full of them, sighing out their knowledge, quietly.

I savoured that ice-cream. I lost myself in it as one might into a novel. And when I'd finished it, I was filled with sadness. I felt so moved by it. I walked back to the shop, but when I reached it, it had closed. I endeavoured to go back the next day, but of course, I never found it.