Rank; offensive to the smell; as a rank and fulsome smell.
I sometimes think I may have been permanently affected by an incident from my youth. I may have been 12 or 13 years old when one day I went to the back yard to take some bags of grass to the curb for pick-up.
The grass was the result of me mowing the lawn, and for some reason I did not take the grass to the curb immediately. The grass had sat outside in plastic bags for over a week, and during the week it rained several times.
The rain caused the grass to, I don’t know, ferment? Whatever the process I found that the bags were filled not just with grass but, for lack of a more precise word, gas. The gas made the bags puffy and unwieldy, and before I could handle the bags I had to punch holes in them to let the gas out.
I moved to poke a hole in the bag at the same moment that I took a deep breath, inhaling deep to catch my breath. I punched a hole in the bag and, as the gas rushed out I inhaled deeply the foul stinking air from inside that bag. The odor soaked my innards, and I felt revulsion all the way down to my lowest guts, a feeling so ghastly I become ill just remembering it.
A headache formed spontaneously, and a feeling of having no foundation saturated my lower entrails.
It might only have been worse had I inhaled gnats or other insects from inside the bag — and who knows, maybe I did and maybe today I host a thriving colony of insects in my guts.
