the one about the smell of death in the dorm

Gather round, all y'all:

The week my freshman year of college that our wing smelled like putrid, maggot-y death remains a core memory for me.

The Monday started like any other. The temperature outside had dropped, and that this meant we didn't want to open our room's windows. This also meant the building's central heat was on. These details are important. 

Our res hall had a unique layout: 

Each floor had six single-sex wings, with a lounge in the middle on each floor. A floor may have two wings of females, and one wings of males, etc. Each wing had its own community-style bathroom. Each wing had a door to the lounge that could be shut.

By Tuesday morning, we noticed a smell. It smelled like something gamey was left to rot in someone's microfridge. 

But since we were almost two dozen 18-year-old males in one wing and sharing one bathroom, the presence of an unwelcome odor wasn't that uncommon. We figured the scent would dissipate.

I woke up earlier than usual on Wednesday morning. This was not by choice. 

That faint rotting smell had come into our room (I shared with two others). "Surely we're not the source of this?" I thought incredulously. The three of us all showered every day and didn't keep food in the room, so it didn't make sense why we'd be the source of the odor. I opened the door to the hallway to go use the bathroom down the hall.

The rotten, warmed smell of death permeated the hallway, way stronger than our room.

Dry heaving, I rushed to the bathroom. So the smell wasn't from us (thank God); it had just crept through the door. A putrid, a brazen mix of cheap, brined propane gas smell and sulfuric nastiness. Now our entire floor knew, and we could not figure out the cause.

It didn't help that one of the girls from the adjoining wing had (sensibly) shut the door to our wing. The funk of death was contained to our wing, but that only spiked its pungency for us.

By Thursday, it overpowered us. Something had died, somewhere. There's no mistaking that smell. Even the dude who was always in his room with his girlfriend had come out to complain about it.

I made arrangements to sleep in a friend's room that night. 

After my first class, I gulped in a big breath of air, opened the door to our wing, and ran to my room. 

While in the hallway, I saw a floormate, Chris. We nodded at each other in grim acknowledgment that we didn't want to talk, because talking meant taking in more breaths, and that meant taking in more of this foul funk of life departed. 

Chris' eyes suddenly widened, he shouted "oh [EXPLETIVE]!?!" and ran into his room.

He instantly sprinted back out of his room to the outside. He also happened to be carrying one of his jackets ... at arm's length. 

Not much time passed before we noticed the smell had lost some of its potency. Were we just delirious from the lack of non-contaminated oxygen? No, it was definitely weaker.

We later learned that nasty truth from Chris' roommate: Chris had gone quail hunting the weekend before. While out in the tall grass, he bagged a quail, but in a rush to keep walking forward to hunt, he placed the dead quail in his pocket. 

He then subsequently forgot about it being there. For four days. 

It didn't help that when he got home, he tossed his jacket onto the floor of his room, next to the heat register. This gave the decomposing, liquefying stench extra motivation to permeate out and disgust us all.

What did help was that Chris was such a gregarious, likable fellow. Our annoyance at him for this fowl foul wafted away as the scent left our wing. Before long, we were laughing about it.

It was another two days before the girls in the adjoining wing let us open the door to the shared lounge, though. In hindsight, I can't blame them at all.