The stench hit me the moment he entered the bus. The man was listening to some sort of Euro-electronica, wires to his headphones running into the neck of his sweater and emerging briefly at the bottom before terminating at the small stereo jack of his CD player, nestled safely in the too-large transparent green pockets of his pants. My brain separated the various strains and viscosities of this stranger’s cologne as he made his way back through the bus, different densities being layered out like crude oil in a centrifuge. The thick oily base of it quickly permeated my skull and precipitated onto my brain, before commencing a vicious assault on the rest of my body. Meanwhile, the piercing thin components of this horrific odor wrenched tears from my eyes and made my skin start to blister and peel. I could taste it. The man reapplied this torturous compound to more or less the entirety of his dermis as he sat down beside me. I gagged, my throat trying to turn itself inside out. Tiny globules of this undoubtedly plague laden fragrance carpet bombed my orifices, washing against my tongue like the lake of fire against its banks, the shrieks of the damned pounding in my skull. Hell hath no fury like this mans cologne. My body heaved uncontrollably, and I was flung to my hands and knees. I lay on the non-slip corrugated rubber of the bus floor, quivering in a sickly colloid of cold sweat and this grinning stranger’s vile perfume, undoubtedly brewed deep within the abyss, in the fiery lab crucible of Satan himself. Slowly, I turned my throbbing head to look up at my tormentor. He sat with a condescending and mildly perplexed smile and started to draw the dreaded little bottle of horrors from his transparent pocket.

The smell of his cologne still makes me cry. The man is dead, of course. He died that others may learn. If you or someone you know is accustomed to attiring themselves copious quantities of cologne as this simpering imbecile was, consider the consequences.

That is all.

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