The bathroom at work and how it smells like death.

I walked into the bathroom and was met with a foul smell I have smelled only a handful of times but because of my first incident with said smell I associate with death.

In third grade we had a pet show and tell. For some reason I couldn’t bring my dogs in that day. I was walking around the building during recess and I turned a corner to see a small snake, poised to strike! I hate snakes. Even this tiny dumbass scared the crap out of me. I froze up and just stared at it. And it never moved. It was dead. Rigor mortis, I assume, kept his head raised and mouth open. It was an extremely hot day in Colorado. Maybe he died from the heat. Who knows.

Regardless, I showed my friends and we picked it up and played with it and some cool teacher thought this was great and gave me a jar to put it in. I now had an animal for pet show and tell! I think I said something like ‘This is my pet snake. He’s dead but I don’t mind!’ cue laughter.

I kept this snake in the jar on my window sill for a long time. Probably the entire summer. Until one fine day my dad came into my room and said, ‘Get rid of that fucking thing, idiot.’ Well I wasn’t going to just throw it in the trash! He needed a proper burial. 

I walked to the No Man’s Land of our neighborhood, which was the undeveloped part of the housing tract (just a bunch of foundation and half built frames we weren’t allowed to play in [so we did]) and found a nice area of dirt to rest him in. I opened the jar and 3 hot sweaty months of dead snake corpse punched me right in my filthy face. It was so foul. I nearly vomited. I plugged my nose and dumped the snake from the jar into the hole I dug with my hands and then covered him up.

And that smell has always been with me. I will never forget it.

Interestingly (horrifyingly, one might say, disgustingly maybe) some time later we were playing in that same area and I had to dig for some reason. As I was doing so I saw what I thought was a rope buried in the ground. I pulled at it and it snapped in half. It was no rope.

It was my dead snake. And I did mind.

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