The braid beside the window

An original literary non-fiction-style account of taking a garlic braid down from a kitchen hook.

For most of the winter, the garlic had been part of the kitchen’s background. Its pale bulbs hung beside the window in a long uneven column. The dried stalks were plaited tightly together, their old green reduced to the colour of straw. Visitors sometimes admired the arrangement. I usually looked past it at the weather.

One evening, I took the braid down to use a bulb. It was lighter than I expected. A loose skin brushed my wrist and fell against my sleeve, making a papery sound which seemed too large for its weight. Close up, the bulbs were not neatly white. They carried grey shadows in their folds and faint purple lines beneath the outer layers.

I broke away a clove. The dry surface resisted for a moment, then loosened. Beneath it was something smooth and cool, firmly contained in its small curved shape. The smell reached my fingers before I brought them near my face. The kitchen background had become difficult to ignore.

I hung the braid back on its hook. A gap interrupted the column, and a few loosened skins moved when I opened the window. From the table it looked almost as it had before. While I ate, however, I could see exactly where one bulb had been. The decoration now carried a visible absence and a smell which had entered the meal.

How does the writer use language to change the presentation of the garlic from background decoration to something immediate?