A distinct smell of sewage is coming from the basement. Sharon has a nose for rot. She buries half her face inside her shirt to filter out the smell and sighs at the inconvenience. Sharon’s phone lights up with images of her best friend’s fragrant getaway in the Serengeti. Giraffes casually show up in the background of each picture. Sharon’s views contain no grassy plains or leggy creatures. Her days decompose in the city while she nervously eats pretzels to forget how much life stinks. Sharon craves more longitude and latitude and maybe some cream cheese.
Today, the only exotic figure on Sharon’s horizon is the HVAC guy who’s come to check the stench in the basement. As they head downstairs, he starts making small talk, filling the bad air with a thick local accent poured like gravy over every word. Sharon doesn’t want to chitchat and finds it even harder to converse with her shirt over her face.
The HVAC guy introduces each sentence with “long story short.” Sharon thinks he uses this intro to make her think he’ll be brief. But he’s not. Long story short, he started out in pizza and lawn care. Sharon politely listens as this strange mammal in the subterranean landscape of her home continues his one-way communication. Long story short, his grandma got Alzheimer’s. When he went to move her out, he found her house filled with bottles of fruity shampoo.
After an hour of chatter and repair, the odd creature leaves and Sharon’s house gets very quiet again. Sniffing around, she notices that the stench is all but gone. The HVAC guy arrived like a stimulus check—like a promise of something auspicious. Sharon wonders how many other guys are out there with monosyllabic names sewn into uniforms, helping grannies and fixing odours.
Despite her lack of verdant views, Sharon feels like she’s just witnessed the rare sighting of a songbird warbling in its regional dialect and wafting of strawberry shampoo. She pops a pretzel in her mouth, picks up the phone and sends a message to her friend in the Serengeti.
