Chapter III

The Smell

I wake up at 1:11

1 p.m., hours off from an angel number. The motel quilt has imprinted itself into my chest—red welts shaped like tiles. The kind of polyester that holds secrets and semen. It smells like someone else’s musk. I rake at my skin until flakes fall off.

The air is thick with body. Not just excrement—though that’s there, cloying and layered with that familiar post-sleep chemical flatness. Underneath it: the bloom. Dandruff. A vein of something rotten-sweet, like banana peels sealed in a hot bag. I don’t flinch. I don’t even open the window. In a minute, it’ll become overly familiar and undetectable.

Most of the room is clothes. Not folded. Not packed. Just... there. Heaps, smears, eruptions. The floor is an uneven terrain of fabric and elastic, nearly fused to the terracotta shag carpet. There’s a pair of leggings dried into the shape of me, stiff at the knees. A tank top curled like a dead worm. Underwear hung from the microwave handle, as if it were airing out—a bra wedged between the mattress and the wall. When I pull it free, it’s wet with condensation. I toss it toward the chair, but it hits the floor, adding itself back to the pile.

I crouch near the corner, digging for the only pair of panties I can still stand. They’re beige—or maybe they were white. Cotton, stretched, stained. I hold them to the light like a specimen. There’s a mark in the gusset—dried brown, maybe blood, maybe not—a smear of something else closer to the waistband. I press them to my face.

The smell is profound. Rich. Sharp, then mellow. Like hot pennies melted into soap scum. Yeast, definitely. But something else too—the inside of a latex glove after a full shift. I breathe it in. Let my nose touch the crusted stain. I want to lick it. I want to taste my decay but stop short, interrupted by the phantom of observation—someone seeing the sick satisfaction on my face. A luxury the road has given me: the freedom to rot in peace.

I turn the panties inside out and pull them on, slowly. I savor it. The shorts are under the desk chair. Damp at the crotch, hard at the hem. When I pull them on, they cling like a second, meaner skin. The sports bra is inside out on the bathroom tile. Salt has stiffened the cups. I sniff it. Onion rings and armpit. I put it on anyway.

I drink warm tap water from a polymer cup with ridges. There’s a lipstick mark on the rim from someone who’s not me.

On the desk: three lines of crushed Adderall, neat and deliberate. I use a crumpled receipt—my most abundant resource—and snort the first one fast. “It’s faster this way,” I mutter, though the truth is I like the performance. It feels naughty. Almost young. The powder hits my throat like chalkboard dust. It burns, then goes flat. Focus comes second. The real benefit is hunger becoming background noise—low, dull, ignorable.

There’s a mirror above the desk, bolted to the wall, framed in beveled plastic pretending to be wood. I catch myself mid-crouch. The light makes my skin look worse—yellowish and poreless in some places, cratered in others. The left side of my face droops slightly. It always has. But now it looks like something’s giving up. My eye doesn’t want to open all the way. My lips are chapped in the center, like a glory hole.

I mouth the word: Jocasta. It lands heavy, like raw meat dropped on linoleum.

It’s a name for a woman who folds linens in a mental ward. Who bakes her bread and weeps at church. Who whispers The Lord works in mysterious ways while fanning herself in a pew. It doesn’t belong to anyone, real—least of all me. I’ve never liked hearing it out loud. Jocasta sounds like a warning. Like a Victorian venereal disease. She’s come down with a case of Jocasta. Symptoms include anxiety and mother issues.

My mother swears she picked it from a baby name book that claimed it meant shining moon. She liked the way it looked in cursive—a dead art we’ve stopped teaching in schools. She didn’t bother reading the source material. Didn’t know—or pretended not to—that Jocasta fucked her son, bore him four children, and hanged herself with her bedsheets. Or maybe she did know and liked the drama. Myth made a woman.

I haven’t said it in weeks. No one’s asked, and I haven’t had to tell anyone. That’s the only benefit of this life: I get to disappear under fake names, missed calls, and motel check-ins that don’t require ID. Jocasta doesn’t come with me. She stays behind, in the house with the drapes always drawn, pretending to be holy.

Outside, the fever air buzzes against the window. I’ve met my quota early this week. I’ve surrendered the day to Lord Laundry. I gather the filth into a trash bag. Take one last whiff of it—my filth in all its glory and rage. A scent unreplicable in quality or quantity. The bag squeals as I tie it shut. The weight of it feels good. Tangible proof of presence. I carry it like a body. Like my body.

The laundromat’s one county over. I’ve passed it a few times. Yellow sign, red letters: SPIN CITY COIN OP. The O flickers. It smells like off-brand detergent and spoiled milk before I even touch the door. Inside: The fans don’t work. The air doesn’t move.

The machines are metal coffins, dented, rust-streaked at the corners. Most are running, but only half hold clothes. Just spinning for show—a way to sit without getting accused of loitering. A man sleeps on the folding table, one shoe off. His sock’s worn through at the toe—blackened. I once read about a hospice nurse who amputated a gangrenous leg for her taxidermy collection. I wonder what his toe would look like on a necklace.

A woman with three kids holds court in the corner. All of them barefoot, eating something beige out of a Styrofoam container. One kid licks a dryer sheet and laughs. I laugh too—reflex. I wave. A wave that says, I’m safe. I like kids. He sticks his tongue out and vanishes into his mother’s flabby stomach, folds deep enough to swallow him whole.

An older man is hunched beside the vending machine, jimmying a quarter from the coin return with a fork. His shirt’s unbuttoned to the stomach. No belt. I see the waistband of a diaper.

The TV in the corner plays static over The Price Is Right. No one watches.

I chose the machine closest to the exit. Feed in quarters one at a time, like they’re being judged. My trash bag body slumps in with a wet slap. No sorting. No softener. I just drown it. Something is soothing in the churn—the industrial rhythm. I sit in a lawn chair that’s bolted to the floor and watch my filth spin. The water turns gray instantly. Something leaks from the washer’s base—the man on the table rolls and moans. A child sneezes into their sibling’s hair.

I smile again at the kids—three of them, entirely engulfed in their universe. Little gods. Loud, sticky, undisturbed. A lawless ecosystem. Their mother doesn’t look up—thumbs twitching across her phone, losing some digital battle she won’t win in real life either.

I used to imagine myself in her place. But better. Clean. Hands-on. A mother who used metaphors and made eye contact. A woman who packed cut fruit in BPA-free containers and never raised her voice. I believed I was built for motherhood. I thought I would be a gift. And that giving life would validate me in return—a perfect trade. I’d pour myself into something new, and the world would pour meaning back.

For a long time, motherhood was my plan for relevance. My quiet way out of invisibility. And I fit the type. A teacher. Stable. Thoughtful. Everyone said I’d be a great mom. And I agreed. I was already doing the work—mourning neglected kids in parent-teacher conferences, making sure they didn’t eat lunch alone, memorizing their allergies. The only thing missing was blood.

And the blood came. Just not how I expected. Now my womb is condemned real estate. Vacant. Toxic. The walls thinned out and were left unpainted. Nothing viable grows there. No tenant wants the lease.

I used to welcome the patronizing tone of mothers—You’ll get it when you’re a mom. I thought, just wait, I’ll earn it too. I’ll be one of you. Now I hear those words like a locked door. A secret language I’ll never be fluent in.

That was the dream. The magnum opus. My quiet way out of irrelevance. And here I am. Barren. Leaking. Smiling at feral children in a laundromat while their mother plays Candy Crush with her tits stretched and halfway out.

I need a cigarette.

I go outside, walk the perimeter. The sun’s stupid and violent, bouncing off the metal siding like it wants to start a fight. The back of the laundromat is worse than the front. A slab of cracked concrete bordered by a chain-link fence that doesn’t close. An empty dumpster squats crooked on rusted wheels, surrounded by bottle caps and a single diaper that’s been flattened by weather.

There’s nothing back here. No crates. No metaphors. Just industrial nothingness.

I kick at a weed, splitting the asphalt. It leans, then stands back up. Resilient in that annoying way things are when you’re trying to feel sorry for yourself. I light the cigarette and lean against the wall—the stucco’s hot and sandy against my shoulder. A drip of sweat rolls down my spine and gets caught in my waistband. I second-guess losing my shirt and tossing it in with the others, but inhale instead. Let it burn. The tobacco is stale, filtered, and generic.

Something moves in my periphery. A cat. It steps out from behind the dumpster. It’s been waiting for the right moment to announce itself. Wiry, skittish, unsure. Pale gray with darker patches. No collar. I crouch and tap my fingers on the pavement.

“Hey, baby,” I say in that voice we reserve for animals, babies, and people we want to like us. “Come here, sweetie.” The cat tilts its head. Blinks. One eye crusted half-shut. Its tail swishes. I slowly put down my cigarette and let it roll in the opposite direction. I try not to move too fast.

I stay crouched. Small. Arm out. I soften my eyes. I smile without teeth. It takes one step. Then another. Its fur thins out at the haunches. Red skin showing through. Patchy, raw. I spot fleas. The closer it gets, the more it looks wrong. Its ears are torn, like it’s been in a fight it didn’t win.

I freeze. My arm is still out, but something in my face must have changed. The cat stops midstep. Blinks again. It’s thinking. It’s clocking my questioning. It resents my observation and then bolts. It’s gone. Just like that. Just like it was never there.