The Smell of
Distress
by Michael C.
Keith
The nose is the most powerful of the
human senses. It has the ability to reclaim
memories and images long tucked away. Even people
in comas detect smells, or at least that’s
what Fergie Myerson had read, and she believed it.
It was this certainty that led her to seek a
method to change the way people on their
deathbeds spent their final moments. She asserted
that scents pleasing to those about to perish
would make their passing a less traumatic, even
pleasant, experience.
After extensively researching which
aromas evoked the most agreeable visceral
responses in humans, Fergie offered her idea to
hospice patients in the last moments of their
lives. To the amazement of relatives, happiness
covered the faces of their loved ones as they
breathed in the mellifluent vapors of Ambrosia
upon passing. Even those who had been the most
morose of patients exhibited blissfulness as they
took their final breaths.
Soon, Fergie’s services were in
such great demand that she found it necessary to
hire others to take on the additional requests.
This turned out to be a fateful decision on her
part since one of her new staffers suffered from
Anosmia and inadvertently mixed a few drops of
hydrogen sulphide into the formula intended for a
client. Rather than provide the dying person a
bucolic departure, it so offended her olfactory
senses that she punched out the priest giving her
The Last Rights.
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