Temporarily pungent odors

Not long ago I had occasion to smell a tremendously potent example of human flatulence and it was staggering. Indeed, I knelt down in deference to its power, tears welled in my eyes and I felt as though vinegar were being poured directly onto my corneas. I coughed and choked a little, my autonomic system apparently mistook the odor for food, and despite its error I am grateful to my faithful body that it would so quickly seek to protect and save me from foul stenches such as this one certainly was. But dear reader as you may well know yourself, retching in response to an unpleasant smell tends to compound the grotesque elements of the situation, perhaps even causing one to imagine tasting the material origins of the odor's abrasive pungency. If I may, the poop, as it were, if you will.

The folk there gathered appeared to be pretending that the offensive smell was not really there, and worse, that it had not been dispatched via a human orifice. Conversation continued to forge ahead, and I gawked in amazement at their stoic resolve to bravely carry on, paying no heed to the noxious fumes that were spoiling the air like an ancient plague. As I had arrived at the scene with the fecal-perfumed bouquet already evident, might I have missed the clarion call which had marked the arrival of said flatulence? Had a low bass note announced its entrance? Something like the synthesized tones out of Close Encounters? Or might it have had a more staccato, machine gun-like rat-tat-tat-tat. These are good guesses, and thanks for suggesting them, but in my guts, in my own viscera, I know that had the odor been accompanied by sound, and this is only speculation at this point, it would have been that of a shrieking chimpanzee. Probably a mother whose baby has been torn from her arms by a barbarous young male from a neighboring troupe. As he runs off, the baby's lifeless body dangling carelessly in one hand, the mother will scream as though all the forces of nature have been concentrated in her small body. This is the sound that I think matches the odor's primordial fury.

And what can be said of the people's denial of the smell out right? How to understand this mysterious taboo? Customs of social propriety are not easily transgressed, nor should they be. But in this case, when one among us has gifted the very atmosphere with potentially poisonous fumes, are those present not behooved to remark on the smell? At the very least a joke or two might be told to add levity to the tense situation. I would hope a more principled soul might even have spoken generally on the responsibility of the farter to exit the room at a sign of such an eruption. Why aim the diseased fumes towards the nostrils of one's friends and acquaintances? At least turn the offending orifice away from our nostrils, please do not insist on launching your sulfur-laced aroma at my sensitive olfactory apparatus. Call a spade a spade and point your accusative fingers at the culprit! It is you! You farted and pretended you didn't!

But what's this!? The outlandish fumes have vanished! Where have they gone? Back into the storm cloud like a retreating tornado? Maybe its very constitution had been torn apart, its minute particles spilling out into the surrounding space, losing their way among lumbering, abundant and tiny balls of oxygen. Or at least that's what the scientists would have us believe. Now I'm sad that it has gone! If only I might inhale deeply once more that thick scent! But what's this, I'm already forgetting the true full-bodied robustness of its acerbic stench. I feel nostalgic for earlier times, when my eyes watered and throat convulsed in mimed puking. But like a jinni, it has disappeared, with no mention of when it might my way pass again. And now I am sullen, wanting nothing more than for the first hesitant molecules of stench to trigger my nostril mechanisms, like a crazed butterfly momentarily alighting on a finger before happily dancing away. Good bye terrible odor, you'll be missed!