Violetta Chris Meraz When I was younger there was this elderly woman who lived on my street—her name was Violetta. She had long stringy white hair, pale wrinkled newspaper cheeks and old leather slippers. Every day she would walk around our street looking for her dog. She never found him; the neighbors said she never even had a dog. Nobody told her.

She emitted this pungent odor. It was never the same two weeks in a row but it was always there, just like those goddamned slips. One week it would be old raisins and rusty bathwater; another it would be sawdust and soap. When I say old raisins, I don’t mean your average size box of sundrieds. I mean an industrial-size f---ing bag of these things lost somewhere underneath her clothes. It was dreadful. The smell would only last a week. You could always count on that. It was like clockwork. My friends and I used to play this game to see who could guess what it would be next. Nobody ever won, but we always played. We would draw straws; short straw had to take on her stench for an entire day.

I remember this one time I got the short straw. It was a Tuesday the day the smell changed, Toxic Tuesday. It was the most awful of them all, this festering concoction of what smelled to us like hot wet decomposing garbage and the downdraft of a campground septic tank. I knew this because my family went camping every summer and I was the one who pointed it out. My lucky day. I threw up 12 times until I passed out. My friends wanted to hose me down but I toughed it out. My parents made me sleep in the backyard for a week. I got to know Violetta a lot better. I even tried to help her find her dog once. We didn’t find him.