by J.C.White-2025

The night’s blackened pals of mountain ridges brooded over the valley fog, an incandescent gauze stirred to a ruddy pallor, ghost-lit by the cold December moon, keeping its mute covenant with the sleeping terrors that lay hidden in the cradle below, until the river would shoulder awake and usher some unfortunate witness into whatever ruin the coming dawn required.

And it was I, the unluckiest of souls, a man destined to awake at 2:00 o’clock AM for a 3:00 ship departure to the airport, leaving Portugal for Tennessee by way of three separate layovers, who was first to see it, and know the horrors of it.

For there are abominations in this world that even the most fevered visions of Poe could not wrench into language, and among them, yea, perhaps chief among them, is my own unwashed flesh. The depravities and sufferings soon to be endured are not solely my own, but shall be unjustly apportioned among the hundreds of innocents who will, over the coming twenty-six hours, fall unwilling victim to my olfactory malevolence. They know it not yet. They sleep in their beds, believing themselves safe, believing the world governed by reason and hygiene. Fools.

And what encounters await them! Not mere casual exchanges on cobblestones or quiet nods in dim-lit taverns. No. These will occur in the inquisition-esque torture chamber known to modern man as the economy cabin, an airborne oubliette where elbows skirmish in trivial turf wars, where the coughs and sneezes of strangers mist the air with democratic impartiality, and where flight attendants, paid handsomely to remind us of our low place in the cosmic hierarchy, glide past like minor deities whose mercy is neither solicited nor granted. In such a realm, proximity is destiny. And destiny… reeks, my friend.

But while these hapless future victims dream of warm showers and citrus soap, I alone sit in this economy-cabin crypt, denied even the most meager ablutions. No hot water. No steam. No soap. No hope. I cannot scour from my mortal frame the scent of death, the silent massacre of millions of skin cells whose corpses, unattended, have become a banquet for opportunistic bacteria. These microbes, godless and efficient, begin at once their desecrations, spawning the grim perfume that now rises from my person like some disembodied warning that the end is near.

Thus have I become, without invocation, without pact, without the slightest ambition for evil, a vessel of affliction. Not through wickedness. Not through hubris. Nay, through the faulty gurgling of a hot water heater whose final act on this earth was to thrust me into the ranks of the damned.

And so I go forth, a wandering miasma in boarding group 3, resigned to my role in the tragedy. I will shuffle down the narrow aisle, every step a silent apology, every seatmate a doomed soul. And when at last the plane departs, when the doors seal shut with the dreadful finality of an Edgar Poe coffin-lid, I shall sit, unwashed, unholy, unavoidably human, and await the screams that only the bravest dare keep inside.

In this way, dear reader, I close the tale. Not with redemption. Not with cleansing. But with the knowledge that somewhere tonight, a Boeing 747-800 is hurtling through the darkness, carrying four-hundred eighty-seven passengers, one demon of stench, and a single broken man whose influence will be felt… long after the cabin lights dim.

A child’s quiet whisper emerges from a distant row… “Mama, what’s that smell?”