It can't be good for you

You don’t recognize your own words anymore.
Doesn’t feel right. Go out on a nice day, everything bright and shiny. For you, the nice day equals a Saturday afternoon in October. Slight chill, leaves changing, probably drinks at the bar that evening.

But it still doesn’t feel right. Doesn’t smell right, more specifically. Oily. Like stale grease left in the pan too long. You first noticed it when you moved here, and for a little bit you thought it originated at the Cracker Barrel down the road from the only apartment you and Melissa could find because there aren’t enough places to live in town because the university is an ever-expanding industry just like the Caterpillar factory and the Frito-Lay factory and the Subaru factory and the Tate & Lyle factory. Too many students, not enough housing. And the only apartment you and Melissa could find, an ADA compliant apartment that made the both of you feel slightly guilty because neither of you don’t need lowered counters and space for wheelchair access and a shower to sit in yet. But you signed the lease and there’s a nice little dog park for the dog. He can go there and play and shit and play with all the other apartment dogs.

The apartment is sort of on an edge of town, and the complex uses classy sounding names for itself and its roads. Overture Flats. Winery Lane. Symphony Road or whatever. But that smell. You think the smell is coming the Cracker Barrel. Maybe even the IHOP down the road. You and Melissa place it after a few days—like bacon grease, maybe.

There’s a main road nearby called Creasy, and you start swapping it for Greasy. ‘Smells real creasy out there today,’ you or Melissa tells one another, and you or Melissa or you and Melissa laugh most times at it.

People you latermeet in town become your friends, and your friends tell you the smell comes from a nearby hog rendering plant. Which tracks, of course, but you can’t find any nearby hog farms when you search online for them. But then some others say it comes from the Tate & Lyle food plant, and that it’s not that natural industrial factory slaughter smell. They make corn-related stuff, but it’s still smells sometimes like something artificial, something chemical, something class action lawsuits will start naming in a decade or two. Either way, that’s it. It’s not Cracker Barrel and it’s not the IHOP. It’s somehow bigger than Cracker Barrel or IHOP.

You smell it on different days in different parts of town. Must be dependent on the wind. Even when you leave Overture Flats fancy ADA complaint living for a house nearer to the places you like to drink, you can still smell the crease semi-regularly.

It can’t be good for you. Can’t be good for Melissa. Can’t be good for the dog. Or the other, newer dog. Maybe we’ll need that ADA complaint apartment again, sooner than we imagine.

Anyway. That’s what writing words feels like lately. Something not quite right about how it all lingers in the air for you. Not necessarily fatal, but it definitely can’t be great for your health. Smells real creasy out there these days.

(((EC)))