RUSTY WIND FALLS, MINNESOTA — Everyone in the room knew he did it, Bob Phalinger didn’t deny he did it.
The blame for the malodorous emission from his posterior was not in doubt, ever, during the entire incident at 329 West Helm Boulevard last week. It was the fact that Bob just wouldn’t smell his own flatulence that rubbed his friends the wrong way so very much. When the smoke settled and the words of anger and consternation had stopped flying between the friends in Chuck’s Pizza Palace and Game-A-Torium, many lives had been irreparably damaged. One of Phalinger’s friends perhaps best summed up his feelings after the events of that evening left him perpetrating an act of vigilante justice on someone he’d considered one of his own, just hours before.
“What kind of corn-fudgin’ muffin hugger is too dag-blasted good to smell his own farts? What a pretentious butt face,” Scott Jackson told us.
Jackson has known Bob since they sat next to each other in Mrs. Sussfield’s eighth grade English class. Bob and Scott have been through drama together in the past, Jackson said, but the incident in the pizza place will forever leave their friendship in tatters, he believes.
“I just can’t see how I can be friends with a guy who thinks he can just fart away and not face the same putrid consequences as his friends,” Scott told us. “If you do the crime, you do the time, in my book. You dealt it, you better sure as hell smell-t it!”
Scott says he, Bob, and six of their friends from the bowling team they play on were at the pizza restaurant celebrating a victory last Wednesday night. As was tradition, the person who got the least amount of strikes, this week Hank Jansen, bought the beers while everyone else chipped in equally for the pizza. The beer that Hank chose was a hoppy one, and that, Bob told us, was the first grave mistake made that night.
“Everyone on that team knows I have a hop thing that makes my gas insanely stinky,” Bob said. “So if Hank’s gonna go and forget that, and then order up a few pitchers of hop-forward pale ales, guess what? My stink spout’s gonna spurt at some point.”
Bob says that after four of the beers, he felt a sudden tightness in his rectum, like a bubble of lava just begging to seep out from under the sea floor, seeping hot destruction out into the world. He knew a rectal expelling was soon to be in the offing. Not knowing how loud it would be, but being extremely certain the butt belch would be “quite repugnant and musty smelling,” Bob decided to “go for the old crop duster move.”
“I got up, said I had to go check something in my car, and then coughed loudly as I walked out of the room, busting a cheek squeaker as I left,” Bob told us. “I didn’t care who heard it was me. I didn’t care at all. I just knew it was going to be smelly as all get out, and I’m told that’s exactly what it was.”
Scott’s nose almost immediately caught wind of the foul odor from his friend Bob’s butt. Being friends for so long, Scott knew right away it was Bob, and Bob knew that Scott would know first. Everyone at the table began hacking, wheezing, and gagging.
“Who the – awww man,” Vinny Skideaux yelped.
“C’mon dudes, take that to the bathroom, yo,” Gary Malloy begged.
Scott ran outside and told Bob to get back in and claim the passed gas so that no one got blamed for it unfairly. Bob refused, telling Scott if the beers hadn’t been so hoppy they wouldn’t be in this mess. That’s when things got heated, and one thing led to another, Scott said.
“The next thing you know, Bob is laying facedown in a pool of blood, I’ve stabbed him sixteen times in the buttock, and the cops are reading me rights,” Scott said. “I just don’t get why he had to be such a dick about smelling his own fart.”
Bob says he doesn’t regret refusing to smell his hind quarter sneeze, however. He says that he wasn’t being pretentious, just “standing on principle.” He points out that he paid for the pizza and he asked the judge to go easy on his old friend, despite still recovering from being stabbed in his buttock.
“Let this be a lesson to everyone involved,” Judge Winston McGee told the court room at Scott’s sentencing. “These things are what societies must always balance — the need for fairness with the right to refuse to smell one’s own farts.”
James‘ satire is found on: The Political Garbage Chute; HuffPost, Alternative Science, Alternative Facts, The Pastiche Post, Satirical Facts, and Modern Liberals.