Friday, February 22, 2019

The Scent of Crime

Ooh, la, la! My mother needed the perfect scent for her apartment! Naturally, I had no idea how bad it would get. Ready? Here we go...
"I want something you spray," she says, "I heard it on the TV the other day, like laundry."

"Okay, Mom, do you want a laundry spray or an air freshener?"

"No! I want what I heard on TV!"

We departed on yet another grocery store adventure. In the cleaner aisle, I pushed for the cheapest air freshener, trying to save some time. "So, Mom, it's cheap. It's, like, three bucks cheaper than the name brands."

"No, no, that's not what I want," she says.

With my patience already half-spent, I say, "What is it you want?"

"I told you, it smells like laundry!"

Before a full-on brawl broke out in aisle 14, I introduced her to the myriad of brands and smells: "Lilac," "Chamomile," "Cinnamon," "Fresh Spring Day," "Chinese Restaurant Trash on a Sweltering Day," "Sweaty Jock Strap," it goes on forever.

While I'm down on my knees reading the various scents, she starts spraying these things everywhere. Not just a piff. Full-on mace blasting. Then she's walking into the mushroom clouds, inhaling like an exhausted bagpipe puffer.

"Mom," I yell in a sorta stage-whisper, "you can't do that! You're stealing!"

She ignored me. Probably didn't hear me, whatever. Mortified, I huffed off, thinking my worst nightmare was about to come true: being prison cellmates with my mother ("Here, Mom, take this shiv!" "Why? I'm not Jewish!"). 

By aisle 15, I'm thinking she probably can't find her way out of the store so I go back.

Bent over, she's still inhaling,  snorting huge clouds of toxins. The store smelled like daisies and ass.

"Mom, stop it," I pleaded, looking around for the grocery store police. "We need to go."

"Okay, okay," Mom finally says. "Where's that cheap deoderant you told me about?"

Sigh. I knew the cheap one's what she'd go for and the ozone coulda been saved a bit if she'd listened to me in the first place. I toss the cheap one in the cart and move on. But, wait, where's Mom? I turn around and she's wiping her hands off on hanging gloves. Takes a good couple of minutes to do it, too.

Now, both of our pictures are on post office walls everywhere, the notorious grocery store bandits.

Speaking of unnatural odors, something smells fishy in the underbelly of Kansas. Read about these Twisted Tales from Tornado Alley.

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