How Smelly Is Your Bathroom? - True Story

Earlier today, I ran into the bedroom and yelled: “Sarah! You gotta come smell what’s going on in the bathroom!”

She slowly looked up from her laptop, frowning and squinting like Clint Eastwood: thoroughly unimpressed, but unlike most, I am immune to her subtle social cues.

“Come on, you gotta smell this!” I enthused, while motioning for her to follow me. As she crept behind me, she nervously said: “I’m scared,” hoping that I might protect her or maybe let her off the hook, but I was on a mission.

Normally, when we walk anywhere, I have to tell her to slow down, but not this time, she inched her way down the hall as if she was a 19th century inmate, with a ball and chain strapped to her leg. Then she froze with a worried look on her face and I knew I had to act fast: “Seriously, you have to smell this, it’s amazing!”

I opened the bathroom door and stepped deep inside so she would follow and I was immediately hit with some exotic aroma of meat and spices from some distant land.

“Do you smell that?” I enthused.

“I can’t smell it.” She nervously said, while standing a foot away from the doorway.

“Get in here!” I demanded.

As she stepped forward she exclaimed, “Oh my God! What is that smell?”

“The neighbors are cooking and look, you left the window open, we have to get invited over there!” I said, while trying to think of some way to weasel myself into their family dinner.

“They used to give food to the previous tenants, so why haven’t they given food to us!” Sarah uttered, desperately, like a scheming crack fiend. “And they were bad tenants who made tons of noise! Maybe we should make tons of noise...”

My mind was racing: I couldn’t even understand what I was smelling or why it was different to any other day. I kept trying to imagine what Islamic people eat, but all that came to mind was flat bread, drenched in some sort of spicy, traditional Muslim curry, that is hidden away from outsiders.

I began playing out movies of me knocking on their door, to ask them random questions, only to be rejected from the best dinner my life.

Just smelling something like that was extremely uplifting and it felt as though my body was rejuvenated and I had shed a few years. Over the next hour we continued to talk, very loudly, about it: hoping those assholes would take the hint and invite us over, but those sadists just pretended like we didn’t exist.

We eventually gave up on the idea of crashing their selfish, family dinner and went downstairs, to prepare to walk to the Asian market. As I opened the door to the kitchen, that is just below the bathroom, I was hit with that same aroma, but it was a million times stronger. My glasses immediately fogged up and I screamed, “Sarah! It’s coming from in here!”

Sarah came rushing in and yelled, “That’s my stock! I need to check to make sure the water hasn’t boiled away!”

I stepped out of her way as she lifted the lid, revealing a few inches of simmering water that surrounded vegetables and a chicken carcass. Then I began to wonder what the neighbors must have thought, while listening to us yelling about how neighborly they were being; while our kitchen smelled like the best restaurant in town.