The March Editor's Pick Writer is James Bizzell
Please feel free to contact James at: james@jamesbizzell.com
MALODOROUS
by James Bizzell
Lily told her boyfriend he shouldn’t go to Belize, but Pruitt went anyway. She’d been annoyed, but not particularly surprised, when his return flight was scrubbed in midair. The crew suspected that an animal had died in the cargo hold, and the plane was grounded for sanitation concerns. It’s Belize, Lily thought, wouldn’t there always be sanitation concerns? Then Pruitt texted that the airport officials wouldn’t let him board another plane. Maybe they were looking for a bribe? By the time Lily had thought to suggest it, Pruitt was already on a bus to Chetumal. Three days later, Pruitt finally arrived at the bus station in Newark.
Lily leaped into his arms--a big, dramatic reunion. Pruitt bent to kiss her, but she caught something acrid on his breath. He noticed her hesitation and flinched at it, so she quickly pecked him on the corner of his mouth.
“I missed you so much,” he said.
“Me too, baby. I don’t ever want to be apart from you for this long.”
They drove through Newark with the windows up. Pruitt’s breath became more noticeable. “Sorry, baby, but when was the last time you brushed your teeth?”
“Sorry. Do I stink?”
Lily tried to joke it off, “I know it’s risky to use the tap water down there. Did you rinse your toothbrush with tequila?”
They drove in silence. Lily took breaths through her mouth. Things would be better once Pruitt cleaned up, and surely he had learned his lesson: he was too old for jaunts to the Third World. His Rutgers buddies had ditched him on some wild beach after the third day. She, on the other hand, was his rescuer, taking a personal day to pick him up at that sketchy bus station.
Now she could taste the smell.
Lily cracked her window. She was beyond the point of worrying about Pruitt’s feelings. The stench had expanded--blossomed--in the enclosed space of her Acura. Ridiculously, the heavy, oily odor made her think of a rotten pie. On its surface, there was a hint of spoiled bread, stale and calcified with mold. As Lily took it in, the mold smell soured to a noxious chemical odor, like old house paint settling in a rusty can. But that aroma was pleasant compared to the odors beneath it. If the stench was a pie, then its first filling was steaming bog mud, loamy and sulfurous and teeming with the smells of animal dung. Beneath that came the first hints of decay: fish and crustaceans. Water creatures shriveled to carcasses as dry as rotten curry. Farther down, the decay turned wet and putrid, like dead bodies moldering in shallow graves. Skin sloughing away, revealing subcutaneous tissue and black ooze. Maggots ate through muscle that had turned to shreds, like termite-infested wood. The stench condensed into a vapor as acrid as quicklime, burning as it touched the back of her throat. And under that, a more implacable heat. An inferno of petroleum-based intensity. A smoky miasma of fumes to kill brain cells. Burning hair and seared flesh. At its core, the stench reeked of Hell.
If the stench was like a pie, then someone had puréed it and poured it into her nasal cavity. The stench had filled her sinuses like plaster in a mold. It had flooded down her throat and coated her tongue. Rancid tendrils--mold, excrement, fish, jellied flesh and napalm--had snaked down into her stomach.
Lily pulled over and vomited on the shoulder of the freeway. Cars blared past, blowing wisps of her hair against her sticky mouth. Pruitt took over driving. By the time they had arrived at their apartment, Lily was in a full-bore panic.
He helped her out of the car, “I’m sorry. I don’t know...”
“Take a shower, Pruitt. You’ve got to get that smell off of you. Use my mouthwash. Swish with mouthwash and peroxide.”
“Don’t you want to clean up first?”
“No. You.”
Pruitt left her on the love seat with a wet napkin cupped over her crusted chin. She already knew the shower and the mouthwash weren’t going to work.
The smell was too strong for that.
“You need to see a doctor.”
“I will. I’ll call right now. But they won’t see me till tomorrow.”
“Maybe we should go to urgent care. There’s something very wrong. You really can’t smell it at all?” Pruitt shook his head miserably.
“And no one else smelled it? On your bus rides?”
“The people at the airport might have noticed it, but it’s not like they came right out and told me I stunk.”
“That’s why you couldn’t get on another fight.”
Pruitt had been at the airport in Belize three days ago. Had the smell been on him for that long? What had that awful place done to her boyfriend?
Supposedly, a bath in tomato juice could treat awful smells like skunk spray. Lily rushed to the market and bought two-dozen cans. As Pruitt stripped off his clothes, Lily began to gag. She’d been dry heaving occasionally since they’d returned, but this retching fit was particularly violent.
“God,” she gasped between spasms. “God!”
“Get out of the bathroom then!” Pruitt slammed the door on her.
Lily opened the windows. She sat at on the sill for a long time, taking in the fresh air. Her throat felt like it had been wrung out like wet towel. Two hours passed, and the sun sank below the roofs across the street. Orange color drained out of the sky like water draining from a tub.
Pruitt stayed in the bathroom. Lily could still smell him through the door.
He emerged at 8 p.m. A bandage covered his left hand. “I tried scrubbing the smell off. I don’t think it worked.”
“What did you use?”
Pruitt shuddered and didn’t answer. “I wish I could hold you, Lily. That’s what sucks most about this--that I can’t get close without repulsing you.”
“You don’t repulse me.”
“What would you do if this smell is permanent?”
Lily had her answer ready; she’d been asking herself the same question. “I love you, baby. No matter what.”
Pruitt seemed convinced.
“Let me check.” With her hands behind her back, Lily smelled the bandage on his hand. She sniffed his forearm, his neck, his ear, his mouth. The stench emanated from every part of him. Her gorge began to rise, and she paused to regain her composure. She dipped her nose to his shirt, to the spot right above his heart. The fumes were at their worst there; Lily imagined them wafting between his ribs and seeping out through his skin. This was the source, the stench’s lair within her boyfriend’s lungs.
She stumbled to the bathroom to retch. When she was done, she saw a splash of red in the trashcan. She lifted the layer of tissue that covered it and found a bloodied tuft of steel wool.
#
Lily woke up, slapped the snooze button and stretched. Then she clamped her hand over her nose. For a few seconds, she had forgotten about the horrible night before. She took a tentative breath.
She ran to the bathroom, where Pruitt was lying on a sleeping bag in the tomato-tinted bathtub.
“It’s gone!”
Pruitt sniffed, “It’s gone?”
“The smell’s gone.”
Lily would’ve stayed home with Pruitt all day--hugging, kissing, and crying with relief--but she had already used two sick days planning to pick him up. She went to work, smiling for the entire trip into Manhattan. She must have been really smiling; one lady gave her a few dirty looks on the train. Some people can’t handle seeing other people happy. Lily held a magazine over her face for the rest of the ride.
Mr. Swanchowsy called her into his office at 9:45.
“Lily, are you sure feel better?”
“Yes sir. I hate using sick days unless I absolutely have to.”
“But...have you been to a doctor?”
Her heart sank, “What’s wrong?”
Mr. Swanchowsy’s jowls folded inward, his eyes drifted to his office door, which he had closed for discretion’s sake.
“We’ve received several complaints of a...hygienic nature.”
“Oh my God.”
“I think you should go home,” his hand closed over his mouth and nose. “I’m sorry.”
Her cube mate, Emily, was exiting the bathroom as Lily came down the hall. A brown stain, probably vomit, marked the front of Emily’s silk blend sweater. Lily avoided meeting her eyes.
She had to pass up four elevators before she could ride alone to the ground floor. She remembered how Pruitt’s odor had worsened, had intensified until it was unbearable within the enclosed space of her car. Her odor must have done the same thing to Emily and Mr. Swanchowsy. Pruitt’s odor hadn’t gone away; it had spread. And she had gotten used to it. It was somehow more mortifying that she couldn’t smell it on herself.
Pruitt was standing on the sidewalk outside the lobby. He gave her a queasy smile; he didn’t seem surprised to see her upset.
“What are you doing here?” Her voice was quivering. The sidewalks were crowded, and there was one man, brown-skinned in a crisp denim jacket, standing particularly close to Pruitt. She lowered her voice so that she wouldn’t be overheard. “I think your smell is on me now.”
Pruitt’s chin knotted into a ball under his trembling lips, “I know, Lily. I’m so sorry. If I had known all this was going to happened, I never would’ve gone...”
Lily glanced at the man in the denim jacket. The man stared at her coolly, assessing her reactions. He wasn’t a random stranger; he seemed to know Pruitt. Together, they had been coming to see her. He was stout man, with a face like a hawk. His chest was as thick and pronounced as a twenty-year-old bodybuilder’s, but his face was positively molten with deep wrinkles and pitted scars. Without moving her head, her eyes shifted back to Pruitt, who was beginning to shake.
“But I didn’t want to be without you,” he stammered. “And you said you couldn’t stand it when we’re apart. Remember?”
“I don’t understand.”
Pruitt plowed ahead; he was nearly incoherent. “I have to go back to Belize, Lily. The government is after me. They caught my trail in Texas. Uli showed me. They’re going to lock me away in some jail, or some lab.”
“Uli?”
“And they’ll do the same thing to you now. I’m sorry I let you go to work. I know you’re probably embarrassed. But Uli said it was the only way you’d be convinced.”
“You planned this?”
“We have to go back,” Pruitt wiped at his nose; then he flashed her a wet smile. “But it’s really beautiful there. The Clouded have a whole island of their own. No one’s bothered them for a hundred years. It was my fault really, I found them. But they are so welcoming! Now that we’ve both been exposed, they’ll take us into their home. We’ll be normal there.”
“You knew this would happen to me?”
“I need you, Lily! And they need us. They need new families, new blood. You always talk about starting a family together. And their island is a paradise...”
The hawk-faced man nudged Pruitt, and Pruitt fumbled to pull a jewelry box from his pocket, the type of box that holds a diamond ring. A group of women stopped in the bustle, realizing what was Pruitt was doing. One of them began to clap. Pruitt’s tears must have seemed romantic to them. Lily glanced back at the hawk-faced man. His eyes had never left her face; she stared into them, black and placid--grasping her, pulling her in.
Pruitt staggered to one knee and asked his question.
James Bizzell is a graphic designer. He lives in Atlanta with his wife, Lauren, and two little ones. In the last few years, he has eked out a couple of short stories and drafts of two novels, but this is his first published piece.