Stinky (Part 1)

Its been a few months now. The smell seems to have found its way into his consciousness. For the first couple of months he thought it was just the office and that he would get used to it. But now it seems to follow him wherever he went. It is an unpleasant smell. Not sharp and irritating, but accumulatively unpleasant.

He was angry now, not only disgusted. He was thinking of ways to breathe freshly once more. Deodorants and just plain old fresh air have not worked, neither has showering. Ignoring it made him find it even worse. The distracting rhythms and harmonies of his favorite music seemed only to amplify it, and so did the beautiful faces and voices of those around him.

Fed up as he was, he took an evening to himself, locked himself inside his house, with no one in it. He began to search. He brought up his feet to his nostrils, they smelled mildly of fungus. Not it. He took deep whiffs at his armpits; the 24-hour protection thing is a lie, he now knew that, but the source of the stink was still a mystery to him. He took his clothes off and sniffed them in all the likely and unlikely places. No. His nose was tired now, dry and constantly on the verge of a sneeze.

Baffled he walked across the hallway. A glimpse of something on his now bare back caught his eye in the mirror at the end of the hallway. He twisted his head to see but could not. Another look into the mirror confirmed it. Surprised, curious and somewhat unsettled, he slowly approached the mirror. He stared; his back to the mirror and his head twisted and his eyes focusing.

“Are we in the Matrix or something??” He thought to himself. ”What in the world is that?” Rather worried now and at the same time immensely curious, he slowly reached and touched it. It was black and it ran in a line from his lower back to the base of his skull. It resembled a zipper in many ways but seemed more sophisticated.

The smell he had set out to identify was now entirely forgotten in the excitement and alarm of his new discovery. At the base of his skull where the zipper-like thing ended he found a piece of metal. A handle it seemed to him. “Yeah right!” he thought sarcastically, “If I unzip this zipper my skin will fall off and I will find out that I am really an alien from outer space!” The humor was rather sickening to him.

In one go or slowly? He was always a slow and careful person. “Too careful” He thought to himself, and against himself and all odds he unzipped the thing all the way down to his lower back.

Immediately, the smell, the same smell filled his nostrils and went directly to his brain, now sharp and unbearable it clouded his mind and nauseated his stomach. He gagged and almost vomited and collapsed to the cold hard floor. His brain throbbing with amplifications and interpretations of all the sounds and sights around him. He fainted.