The bathroom stinks of asparagus piss but it isn’t his—heaven forfend—because he’s a righteous man rolling holy through a profane world. The smell appalls and infuriates him, sulfureous, netherworldly, satanic. A sacrilegious vegetable, its reek assaulting his devout nostrils.
He stomps back into their bedroom, shakes his wife out of sleep—to have and to hold—pressing his face against her face, whispering, “Do you smell it? The piss? The reek of asparagus piss? Was it you, hm? Have you betrayed me?” Noses smushed together, raw matrimonial clay. He thinks of his neighbors, the Healys: Mr. Healy’s wandering, adulterous eye; the blue light of their big screen tv bathing his yard in secular distractions through the night; the molding badminton net, a feeble division; the dead spruces like tinder he prayed would ignite; the rotting raised beds which overflow with asparagus every spring, marring not just their yard but the block, the community, the town, the country—the human family in its wretched entirety. The Thanksgiving they hosted. The tray full of steamed and buttered asparagus. Even out of season, the horrid heap of woody stems wormed their way onto the holiday table. With neighbors like these, who needs—no, thank you—damn their eyes! “And it shall come to pass, that instead of sweet smell there shall be stink,” he bellows.
“Hon, you’re spitting on me again,” his wife says, turning over, seeking refuge in the dark corners of slothfulness.
“If it wasn’t you, whose piss was it, eh?”
She starts to fondle his balls to distract him but he won’t be distracted! The stench wafts viciously from the bathroom in the hall, contaminating the whole house, turning the cool wood floors into brimstone. He leaps out of bed and presses his face against the window. All is quiet at the Healys, too quiet. The moon shines fat and stupid. The hostas hunch meekly in the mulch. This reek, he thinks, unforgivable, an affront. The grease of his face, of his life, his anger, smears the window. The moon, the grass, the dirt. Idiot stars and their indifferent shining. Stench. Vengeance. “And shall be tormented day and night,” he whispers to the window and all the earthly and heavenly realms worlds beyond and above it, “for ever and ever.”
***
For a week the mysterious stench lingers or rather dissipates then reappears. A demonic miasma summoned nightly. Occult asparagus blooming in the ether. He beats his breast. Tears out his hair. Yanks out a molar. “We can find Bin Laden’s porn stash in Pakistan and suck fuel out of shale and split the atom and get Chinese children to make phones and you’re telling me we can’t figure out where this unholy smell is coming from?”
“Snookums, I’m not telling you anything,” his wife coos, a lump lost in the swirl of sheets. “I’m just saying I don’t smell anything. Maybe you’re imagining things. Relax. Remember what the doctor said about your blood pressure, stress, the stent.”
He paces himself into exhaustion and finally sleeps, dreaming of a field of white asparagus under a green sun, sprinklers watering the vile crop with white noise from old tube televisions, with the laughs and tears of generations of faithless Americans. Uncle Miltie is cracking jokes while crucified in the corn field, a scarecrow comic. Christ sits on a stalled tractor in the distance, cursing and flooding the engine. Out in space, an omniscient intelligence with an IQ of six drifts endlessly, feeding off the entertainment—the joy and pain—of a noxious, never-ending yesteryear.
***
Another week stinks by. During the full moon, he infiltrates the Healys. To prepare, he force-fed himself ten bunches of asparagus for dinner hours before and gulped down four gallons of water. A well of asparagusic piss is springing up eternally within him. He hates himself, a fallen creature in a fallen world. Hates his wife for relishing, with a telling sigh or well-timed chuckle, the ever-increasing velocity of their descent. As the Healys sleep—his neighbors, his tormentors—he skulks through their house pissing in every corner, great, rushing, gushing streams of piss, exorcising the phantom stench from his house and bestowing it on the Healys. Bladder rumbling. Head and heart pounding. Pulse racing. Forgive us our trespasses. We were looking for the baptismal font but took a wrong turn while rubbernecking at Sodom and Gomorrah and ended up mired in this suburban sulfur cauldron. He thinks about his wife asleep next door, the lazy jezebel and her dexterous ball-fondling fingers. Where did she pick up such a skill? Illicit coupling with unbelievers most likely. How could he have been duped into marrying such a creature? He thinks about divorce, settlements, alimony, the eyes of the law, the eyes of the Lord, about stars, suns, bright burning balls cradled by the cold vast universe—
***
The Healys awake to a house smelling of sulfureous urine and the body of their dead neighbor slumped in the corner by the window facing his house. The parents corral their kids in the den, sit them in front of the Morning Show. A fine forecast. A slight breeze. Seasonable, even warm. Anyone for badminton, wouldn’t that be nice? Mrs. Healy stands on the porch waiting for the ambulance. Mr. Healy waits in his living room, bewitched by his neighbor’s wife—widow—in her bedroom, nipples dark and pert in her thin negligée, standing at the window and holding a half-gnawed bunch of asparagus in front of her like a wedding bouquet.
-- Jon Doughboy was an emerging writer in the short-lived Hobbyist Scribbler Movement (2023 – 2024) which sought to defetishize writing, focusing not on writing as a craft or a credentialed profession or a precious calling, but a hobby, even a fun one. He was found drowned in the toilet in the third stall of the men’s room at the Walt Whitman Travel Plaza in New Jersey. Police ruled it an uncanny accident but his fellow hobbyist scribblers know his blood is on Literature’s joyless hands. Read his obituary @doughboywrites