Skinning Shed Smell

Smell is the strongest sense. The olfactory bulb sits right on the brain and scents trigger emotions, thoughts, memories, and associations that our conscious mind barely registers. Science still isn’t sure how the chemicals we inhale cross the neurological barrier to the brain, but the effect is profound. Profoundly disturbing in this case. All I could smell was death.

           I’d grown up around that smell. The musky, pissy aroma of animal pelts and the sweet, rotting smell of offal. The rancidness of beaver fat. The astringent odor of chemicals. My dad had been a trapper, running lines through the Maine woods in the sixties, seventies and eighties. He’d had a skinning shed out back of our trailer that was rich with end-of-life scents. Even when he grew older and no longer ran his trap-line he’d spend hours in the shed greasing his old traps and honing his knives. It’s where I’d found him dead of a heart attack one December morning the scent of his loosed bowels mixing with the never-faded odors of his long dormant trap-line. So, more than the hard bench that made my ass ache or the buzzing sound coming from the ballast of the flickering fluorescent lights or the garish green of the vending machine in the corner it was the smell of this place that made me edgy. It was as if something dark had clawed its way out of the cellar and was almost, but not quite, touching me.

           I wasn’t alone. There was a little girl, maybe five or six, playing a complicated make-believe with some plastic animals on a jacket her mother had spread for her to cover the dirty the floor. And the mom, a tired looking thirty maybe or an exhausted twenty it was hard to tell. She had a fake leather purse and shoes that had been stylish a few seasons ago and nothing but resignation around her eyes. There was an older man, too. Not aged, but past mid-life with a pot belly straining his white office shirt. We didn’t talk. We just sat in the buzzy, flickering, too bright room on hard benches embraced by the smell.

           A clock on the wall read 10:48. I’d been here since they opened the doors at nine. I figured I’d get in early and get it over with. Joke’s on me. The mom and daughter had come in a few minutes after me and the older guy about an hour after that. No one else had come in. No one had left. I had checked in at the touch screen at the door and had received a number on a shiny slip of paper, thirty-eight, that I had no idea how to judge. I wasn’t the thirty-eighth visitor of the day. It wasn’t my age or any sort of ID number that I could understand. There wasn’t a meter on the wall to tell me which number was being served or who was up next. Just 38. So I sat.

           I reached in my pocket to look at my phone before I remembered that I’d had to check it along with my credit cards, anything with a magnetic or electronic signature, at the metal detector in the foyer. I wished I’d brought a book or a magazine. There weren’t any in the room. I got up and paced over to the vending machine, but in a place where visitors were deprived of cards (and who carried cash these days?) I was at a loss as to its purpose. The machine held an assortment of low excitement snacks – fudge rounds cookies and peanuts in cellophane sleeves and strawberry sugar wafers. I walked back to my seat.

           I must have dozed for a few minutes because I woke as my body jerked. I’m sure we’ve all had the experience, doctors call them hypnogogic jerks, of a sudden tensing spasm as we drift off to sleep. I’d experienced them often when I was a kid, but hadn’t recently. Maybe the smell of the room triggered some unconscious sympathetic reaction. Maybe the skinning shed odor of the room, the smell of my youth, caused my body to react. Hypnogogic jerks. For some reason I’d always associated them with falling or with danger. I chewed on the inside of my cheek. I wasn’t really, I told myself, in any danger.

           The door at the end of the room, opposite the entrance leading to the foyer, opened and short woman walked out holding three clipboards. She handed one to each of the adults in the room, stepping quietly around the little girl. I looked at her as she handed me a clipboard, the kind with a ballpoint pen on a chain, and opened my mouth to ask her about the wait, about my numbered slip of paper, but thought the better of it and remained silent. She looked at me with a small smile, no teeth or dimples, that seemed designed to quell inquiry. She wore a cardigan sweater with an ID badge clipped to it. The lapel of the sweater had turned the badge the wrong way and I couldn’t read the woman’s name. And as quickly as she had entered the woman left.

I looked around and saw two heads bent over clipboards. I listened closely and heard the quite whisper of the little girl talking to her animals and the plastic tapping of cheap ballpoint pens on the clipboards. I began to fill in the blanks and spaces. Name. Address. Date of birth. Mother’s maiden name. There was a box on top of the page that read NUMBER with no explanation. I wrote 38.

Three pages and four minutes later I was done. I’d given them all the information they’d requested. I’d filled in my number in the box at the top of each page. As if she’d been waiting for me to finish, the small woman opened her door again. “Thirty-eight,” she said and I stood and walked toward her. She held her door open with one hand and took my clipboard with the other. I looked back at the woman with the child and the pot-bellied old man. Both of them still had their clipboards. Then I stepped through the doorway. Thirty-eight I found out was the code for my procedure, and the procedure the source of the skinning shed smell.