By: LivelyTH
PROLOGUE
“Shit, shit, shit!”
The wheels of her bicycle skidded from gravel to mud to pavement as she braced navigating the city sprawl ahead of her. An oversized chicken costume was strapped to her back - legs flailing in the headwind.
“Sorry!”
Narrowly avoiding the path of each citygoer, they rebuked in a stream of shouts that she couldn’t afford to respond to. Her watch read 11:57 last she checked it. How long had she now?
“12:02?! Monty’s gonna kill me!” She thought, distracted for a moment by the ticks on her wrist. But a moment was just enough.
CRASH
The front wheel snagged on a corner of the stall and she was sent flying with her forward momentum. Magazines and newspapers dislodged and flew about in the chaos.
“HEY!” said the boy behind the counter. No older than 14 the girl reckoned, as she dusted herself off.
“I’m so so sorry, I-I’d help clean up but I CAN’T be any later than I currently am.”
The kid looked up at the brunette’s freckled face with something between a glare and a grimace, before rolling his eyes and starting on the paper rubble. Legs ajitter she looked from the bike to the boy, and back to the bike, before producing a grasp of bills from her pocket and slamming them on the table, grabbing some stray newspaper and bursting off again.
“Hey wait… lady, that paper’s only a dollar!” the boy's voice strained to reach the distant vandal.
“I know!”
The pillowy chicken head stared back at him, and lost in a slight chuckle he’d forgotten - for just a moment - the cleanup duty she’d left him.
“ah nuts…”
-
On the stroke of 12:05 she turned the final corner, making out the figure of a stumpy man at her post. He was dressed all business-like, stamping his foot in a markedly exaggerated fashion once their gaze met.
“I’m sorry Mr. Montogomery I was held up at th-“
”Wherever it was, you clearly had enough time to buy that newspaper! Get that thing on this INSTANT, or you and Gran Pollo will be parting company! I won’t tolerate any more latenesses young lady. Even if you ride up here with a missing arm next time! Do I make myself clear, Candice!?”
He certainly looked like he wanted to rip her arms off. And here she thought ol’ Monty’s brows could only get so furrowed.
“R-roger, sir!” She punctuated by completing her chickeny attire and slamming down the head of the costume. She held up a feathery arm in salute.
“Hmph.” He looked her up and down. “And don’t go thinking you’re getting a break today, you’ve taken enough company time this month with your tardiness.” He continued in a gruff tone, before scoffing with a sort of guttural flem that never ceased to grate against Candice’s entire being, and marched back into the premises.
Readying herself for the day to come, she meditated in an inhale. The cooing of pigeons on the rooftops. The chatter of passersby. The insistent blaring of alarms and horns. She just had to become one with the city bustle. The faint sound of a radio could even be heard from a nearby parked car.
“Looks to be one of the hottest on record, Jerry.”
Her face contorted at the prospect of being in this damned costume for six hours. Six. Straight. Hours. She stared at the wooden arrow at her feet: ‘GRAN POLLOS SUMMER SALE’. She’d yet to get a knack of these things. She’d been getting better though, she thought.
“Well…best get to it.”
But as she leaned forward to pick up the sign, an ominous gurgle bubbled within her - a consequence of the real reason she’d shown up late today. The product of some less than ideal breakfasting choices, looking back.
It was gonna be a long day.
A Gas at Gran Pollos
Everything was louder that Saturday afternoon.
Bleeps and blares were piercing. Coughs and sneezes were grating. The clap and clatter of toe cap formals was resonant to Candice as she moved the arrow in motions that would have appeared unnatural and sluggish to any who were paying attention. Each noise threatened a jolt, and each jolt threatened something else - something she thought had been sufficiently dealt with in the ‘facilities’ earlier that morning.
With gritted teeth, she knew there was nothing to do but struggle through. In all three shifts of her employment she’d done a poor job of showing up on the hour. Now she was on thin ice.
Lost in the labyrinth of Venien City on the very first day, her interview (if one could call it that) had been conducted over the phone the morning prior. She assumed her vague understanding of the route would be enough to get there on time, but the city was like none she’d ever dealt with back home: it was a web-like expanse riddled with right and left turns at every inch of every straight. They all tracked towards the city centre (where its consumerist beacon stood at least a menacing 1000ft tall), but Gran Pollos was nestled deep in Venien’s urban alcoves. Even with one of those fangled smartphone thingies it would’ve been a trek and then some.
So, to make up for the first impression, she’d planned her second outing carefully and set out with time to spare, but her bike’s ageing handlebar had plans of its own.
Down the cost of a repair and taxi drive, and with the looming threats of rent and unemployment creeping up on her, Candice made an express point to herself: she would show up on time the next day. It was the strapping of her funds that had even inspired her to shop more frugally than normal. That morning, her meal plan consisted of meat products scavenged from the back-end of ‘VAL-YEW MART’: ‘faux-pork’ and ‘chicken sauzage’. She’d lovingly dubbed that morning’s breakfast as the ‘Under a Dollar Meat Platter’ (‘UADMP’ for short), and before long her bowels had dubbed it…
Grrllgllllllll
…Inedible slop. By the time she was able to step away from her home’s porcelain throne - which had been yet virgin to those kinds of horrors - lateness was guaranteed even if she shot through every street with complete abandon. That didn’t stop her from doing exactly that, of course - a bit late was better than very late, and a pissed-off Monty was better than a homeless Candice.
Grrggggllll
But it seemed to Candice that her gut was not finished ‘airing its complaints’.
Uhmf…come on girl, you can do this. You’ve gotten throu-ooooooghh…worse.
Mid-thought, a gurgle of bubbles sloshed around her insides, causing Candice’s eyes to wobble in their sockets and her sign to wobble from her grip. She caught the wood underwing before it fell too far, stumbling about like a fool in the process.
People walking by shot her the ‘second-hand embarrassment’ kind of side-eyes she was all too used to. That cross between pity and snide judgment that would hollow her out with each subsequent screw-up she made. But she’d developed thicker skin since junior high; whatever the adult world threw at her, she could handle it! She could handle it.
I can handl-
lllgrglllrgllll
HONK
“eep!” Candice let out an audible squeak. Just as quickly, the side-eyes turned into eyes that pained themselves trying not to glance in her direction, maybe for fear of being stabbed or mauled by a crazy chicken person. Somehow, she thought that to be worse.
…I-
GRGLLLLL
-DAMN IT!
***
There we go!
With a final magazine slotted, order had once again been restored to Todd’s place of business. Well, it was his Father’s business, but it made him feel cool to think himself a lofty business magnate. Selling tabloids and 'The Ob Portum Venien'. Every Saturday.
Next to overflowing bins of garbage.
Heh. To be fair, what we’re selling isn’t much better…
Todd scanned the tabloid he centred on the rack: ‘FLORENCIA: NEW TIT JOB?’
Who buys this crap?
The corners of his mouth upturned, a slight blush of red skimming the cheeks adjacent.
And who cares about Florie’s boobs anyway?
Todd swapped his sights to an issue of the Ob Portum, as drab as ever, to avoid her patented ‘sleepy and superior’ gaze, as if she was able see him, much less be able to read his next lingering thought.
Everyone knows her ass is where it’s at.
…
alright, back to work.
‘Work’ was a stretch. It seemed less and less people cared about the ol’ pop-up newsagents these days. Typical. Hell, the most he’d done all day was…
A less lecherous smile plastered over the teen’s face, fist slumped into cheek flesh and elbow resting on the table that hung above the retractable partition. It wobbled under the pivot of his arm, and as he used his left palm to stabilise it - a familiar motion driven into him from dozens of saturdays spent with his face in his hands and his eyes in the sky - he couldn’t help but set his sights to where she had gone to.
That blazing burst of entropy ricocheting down pinball-lane streets. She’d given him a break - however brief - from the bleak Summer boredom. He sighed and clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth.
As he went to slouch down further and doze off, he noticed something bunched up against the partition, sitting splayed out and spine-up - he’d missed one.
Shit. Pops’d give me an earful if I left that there
Todd gambled a lean over the edge of the table - which jutted uncomfortably into his stomach - and honed in with a claw-machine grasp. In the time it took to keep lunging at it without barreling over, he could have leapt over and back several times. He would have also spared himself the stares and glares of suits walking by, no doubt wondering why he was not doing exactly that. Still, stubbornness prevailed.
Gotcha!
Beneath the tent of the Ob Portum was another item: a glossy white rectangle. It had words and a picture - it was an ID card! And, he could recognise who was pictured immediately.
THUNK
He plonked nose-first into the pavement. His forehead followed, scraping along the hot stone.
Now himself splayed out, he wiggled the bridge of his nose and checked to see if it’d misaligned. A dab of blood painted his finger. He shook it off (nothing a bandaid couldn’t fix), and planted himself upright. Todd eyed what was written, or at least what he cared to read.
Candice O’Conner
D.O.B. : 04/04/2004
Eye: BLU
Hair: BRN
Sex: F
Weight: 135lb
Height: 5’7
Reading the weight part felt intrusive, prompting a sly and fleeting smirk from the lad before he settled on the picture. The brunette looked tired. World-worn at age 19. Her hair was an unkempt bobcut, whipping haphazardly and rough at the edges, and her half-smile seemed forced. But it was her eyes that stood out: they didn’t look soulless (or at least the soul hadn’t been sucked out of them yet), but if Todd had to put a word to how she looked, it might’ve been ‘impatient’. He wondered if this was what awaited him in two short years.
He stood up and twirled the card between his thumb and index - newsprint and magazine blurring into the background as he entranced himself in the motion. Today had been slow - painfully slow. This morning Todd could feel time crawl limply towards an end stretching perpetually backwards.
And then the universe thrust something unexpected his way: Candice O’Connor. A magnitude more crazed and dazed and flustered in person than a picture could ever capture, and then gone as quickly as she came.
Blazing burst of entropy.
He checked his phone:
‘Dad: will be out on errands until 2:20, mind shop while I’m gone’
The time read 1:20 pm. That was all the convincing he needed.
A couple hops over the partition and he was ready to find the weird chicken girl, skateboard in hand and plaster on nose. Sure, he could’ve just waited ‘till she traced her way back to him, but who was to say when that would be. A few minutes, he told himself. That’s all it’d take, and then he’d be set for the rest of the afternoon.
After shuttering and locking up shop with an unpracticed hastiness, he was ready to embark.
***
Nope, not in here, not gonna happen, no way Jose. No, no, nooo…
While Candice engaged in a psychic dialogue with her sphincter, pleading for its silence, a bead of sweat slithered down the arc of her spine, tickling her lower back and pooling in the narrow space in the waistband of her jeans, sinking into the wet damp of her asscrack.
Without a reprieve to undress prior to putting on the canary eyesore, she now had to contend with the added swelter from double-layering in jeans and panties, while the sun zapped down without remorse; it felt as though every spite-brimming ray was directed straight at her. The lacey fabric that hugged her rear only continued to dampen due to the sun’s onslaught, the poor ventilation of her suit, and the physical exertion she had kept up so far.
And all of that exacerbated by the need to keep her pucker shut.
In her mind, to put down the sign for even a moment, never mind asking for a bathroom break, would be to enact Monty’s wrath, whom she imagined glaring at her from the storefront windows.
“Yeh? Well I can get there in about five minutes. It’s 1:21 right now so that should give us a few minutes to prep before the 1:40 sit-down. Oh yeh she’s such a bitch isn’t sh-”
Candice’s heart sank at every indicator of time’s slow passage - most of all the Tower’s hourly chime (beep doodoo, beep doodoo). Only the one had sounded so far, and the dead air between when she started and one o’clock felt so much longer than an hour as she cradled and thrusted the splintery arrowhead. She’d done well to stick it out for this long, but something had to give. The valve needed loosening or something was about to rupture; those complaints needed airing, tainted air be damned!
The brunt of it would’ve all been… ughhh ‘cranked out’ earlier, right? Man I’m never eating another UADMP, that’s for sure. I need to-a-dump right nnnnnnghhhhh…owugh.
A pinned tactician in negotiation, Candice was willing to compromise. She convinced herself that being subjected to any fart she ripped couldn’t possibly outweigh the building discomfort that thrashed against the walls of her intestine. It was like a snake slinking through fleshy tunnels. A snake in seizure.
…Just…a small one, to test the waters
…frrsssrss
Peaking its way out as a low, inconspicuous hiss, the fart slipped out of her anus with a feeling that was sickly warm. It was as if a steam pipe were ruptured for only a moment, and would scald anybody unfortunate enough to be caught in the pressurised blast; what was worse was the feeling of warmth that clung to the crease of her ass once the fart had concluded.
And, now…for the sm-
The sound was a faint whisper, scarcely audible, but this controlled little puff was whiffy to lay it plainly. A curdled spring of off-milk laden, swampy rotten eggs shot into her nostrils like a sling of arrowheads into castle arrowslits. Her upper lip and cheeks skewed in a hidden show of disgust, as she damned the fact she couldn’t retract her hands and waft the stank away. Not that it would matter in this circumstance, but the mere action of doing so would have been satisfying, as if she were scratching a persistent itch.
Eww…ewwww…OH that is RANCID, ugh…hnng
frss fwooooorssssn frmmmsssnn
Trailing hot off the back of the first (both literally and figuratively), another trio of farts oozed their way out - longer and heftier, and tipping over the barrier of audibility as the last two began to sound like stifled whale moans. A cloud - that would be opaque brown if visible - billowed its way up.
Candice was struck with a real and active urge to choke on the stench, caught in that painful sneeze-like trance where you don’t know if it’ll ease away or come through. The quality of her sign-spinnage had also started to dwindle; restrained, jerky motions arose that gave her the look of a failing animatronic, though lord forbid anybody inspect its inner workings given the brimstone funk settling into every nook of the suit.
Oh, MY, GOD. There is NO way that came out of MY booty…what were those…ughh
She resisted the urge to vomit, swallowing the spittle, acid and chunks before they could rise to a point of no return, and before 'Cleaning Chicken Suit' needed to be added to her list of reparations. That was assuming the gas hadn’t already permanently etched itself into the suit’s fibres. A bold assumption.
What were those sausages EVEN FRIGGIN’ MADE OF? How does it smell WORSE than earlier?
Being so intimately confined with her own ass and the rotten fumes slipping out of it - a swirling brew festering in the broil, without any kind of aircon - that latter question might as well have been rhetorical. Her heart began to beat in heightened tempo. Her cheeks began to flush crimson.
FWARP FWWWARP FWWW-
Candice heard a squeal - a delighted kind of squeal - which caused her to clench up in pained surprise.
“Mama Mama Mama, the Chicken Man is making funny noises!”
The little girl waved her even littler pointer finger in Candice’s direction as she bounced up and down on trampoline-knees, and near-broke her neck looking back and forth between the adult woman beside her and the feathery anomaly in front.
“Sounds like a duck, not a chicken! They taught us the difference on-”
The mother eyed Candice with a vaguely disgusted, knowing glare as her daughter chattered on with glee, before she turned to her girl and mirrored her smiley attitude.
“That’s great, honey, but Mama thinks we should eat somewhere else?”
The child seemed genuinely deflated at the prospect of not getting to go to the diner with the duck-chicken hybrid, but she perked right up when the mom told her she could build her own ice cream at this other place Candice couldn’t quite catch the name of. Satisfied, she waved to the duck-chicken as they walked away, with her head craned as far as it would swivel. ‘Mama’ shot a lingering glare in Candice’s direction.
Candice mouthed out ‘sorry’, though nobody would’ve known it. Nobody deserved to smell her nasty shit-stank just because she wasn’t willing to heed expiration dates. But anybody with ears and an idea of what a fart sounded like would be able to put two and two together and steer clear of the restaurant. The Mom had the right idea.
How long until the smell would really start to permeate the suit’s fibres, though? Questioning sneers turning into looks of visceral disgust were all too vivid in her mind’s eye, and it was beginning to pluck at the hairs on her skin. Unfortunately, closing the valve wasn’t as easy as opening it.
PpppPPPprplllplpl plorp
And, as if to accentuate the point, her rear flushed out a concerningly wet fart.
That was…icky…
Icky might’ve been an understatement. The sweat that had accumulated along the crease of her ass and that glazed the rim of her sphincter gave the fart a uniquely unpleasant tone. It was like squeezing mayonnaise aggressively through a sauce bottle, with the volume ramping up midway through the first release and settling into a barrage of muddy sounding bubbles, before being capped off by one ominous sounding plop of stink. Candice could feel the hot gaseous weight expand from ground zero.
Ugh…UGH. Ew ew ew ew! it smells…it smells like a dead animal wrapped in another dead animal, marinating in skunk spray and shit and, and-
Her face, which had been cycling through a reel of contortions, began to take on a restrained disposition. The look of someone holding back the urge to let their emotions out, in whatever way that might happen. Maybe she’d scream, maybe she’d cry. Though she wasn’t heavy on fluids.
People were starting to put distance between themselves and the restaurant, and as the unsure slurry of feeling hung over her, the sign started to hang limply off of her folded wing-tips. The compounding fartgasses and ramping hornet stings of embarrassment were starting to take their toll. For a second, she’d even begun to dissociate.
grrgllglglll
But her grip tightened in a blink at the bubbling sensation that swept her stomach. Another string of gas was making the rounds and worming its way to freedom.
Fffrrrrpp frrrrrp fsssssslp - PLROPplplpp!!
Calling it a string makes it sound wispy, and for the most part it was. An eeking hiss you could just barely shrug off - evil, noisehair-singing stench aside. The crescendo, though, didn’t come gradually; it didn’t come quiet; it didn’t come any less repugnant. Bubbles of eggy hell, so thick and weighted that they swamped the suit’s underside with a humidity and stench no natural bog could match, were essentially roaring from where Candice was standing: “over here! Look this way! Get a loadadis Chick!”.
hooh……OOOHHHHHH
Instinct took over. Candice reeled, dropping the damned plank before clutching the suit’s waist with her wings. She tilted her eyes up to survey her surroundings, but still not a single person was looking her way. They were filing past the building like a horseshoe, but that seemed like the extent of their outward acknowledgement as they trod the other side of the street.
It stirred a unique kind of loneliness. She’d been subject to her share of insults, sneers and bruises before she came here, but this was isolating.
And with that thought, Candice found herself tilting over the emotional threshold. Time to cry, or scream, or-
“Pff-ff…”
A pap-pap of nasal exhales were let out from within the yellow bombshell - soft and defeated enough that nobody was going to hear it. It wasn’t the seeds of a breakdown, but an earnest response to an absurd situation with what little energy she had left. An old beetle sputtering its way gently to the scrapyard when it knows it’s at its end. It was unreal. She’d been cranking out farts so sinister sounding that nobody was even on her side of the street anymore! For only a moment, the briefest, unprecedented flash of pride lit up in her, and was snuffed out just as quick as her sinister scent, refreshed with another silent release, sobered her up again.
Phewie, damn heat’s makin’ me think funky while my ass is makin’ me smell funky, yeesh. Haha…ha…wh-
Her semi-lucid thoughts were cut off when she looked left.
What.
A figure was enlarging by the second - an initially gentle cruise accelerating with a target now in sight.
The ruffled mop of brown hair and a blue-white tee was sharpening from a blurry splotch of colours to something Candice could identify clearly. Candice kept on picking at her frazzled brain for the why, all the while dreading the moment the boy would step too close. Not only due to the sheer embarrassment that would come from that being his second impression of her, but also because she’d consider her fumes at this point to be something you could rank on a hazardous gas chart. In a desperate state she signalled a 'cut-it-out' neck-slit gesture with one hand and a 'stop' hand-wave gesture with the other.
Having somewhat acclimated to the fog she was drowning in, Candice found it difficult to discern how bad she stunk from the perspective of someone on the outside. In actuality, a half-meter radius of stink surrounded her, composed of gas that’d struggled itself through the stitching and now slunk around her like a gaseous, pillowy buffer - a diluted form of what swirled within, dropping off quickly as you stood back from the mascot, but vile nonetheless.
He waved a small white item as he dismounted the board and began to trek the remaining distance on foot. Candice was just too frazzled to piece it together immediately.
Take a hint! Vamoose! Leave! I’m on d…duty (ugh)
“Hey uh, I think you dropped this some way back”
Had Candice still been holding the sign, it would have fallen on the edge of the word ‘dropped’. She clattered around with her hands in the side of her jeans, trying to find the thing she knew was not there while her limp wings jerked around.
Shallow pockets…
“Candice? Candice O’Conn- O'Connor?”
He was close enough to stutter, which meant he was close enough to be stung by the sulphury buttfunk. Too close for comfort - Candice recoiled as the boy stepped forward.
“Hello? Is an ‘O’Connor’ on shift? Do you know where I can find her?” The boy eyed the mascot with the kind of concern you’d extend to a wild animal “You ok?”
Candice had run out of space to move back. She froze up.
“Seriously, you aight?”
He motioned a wave to inside the chickenhead, where he could barely see anything behind the hatched mesh stretched between the upper and lower beak. With a scrunched up look of defeat the boy turned away from Pollos mascot.
“I’m gonna go inside.”
“N-!”
Candice couldn’t articulate a word, but she did step to block the boy’s path; she wiggled a hand through the space where the head of the suit met the body, while trying to keep the gap as tight as possible to prevent any errant emissions from smacking him across the face, then snatched the card and retracted it greedily.
“...”
“...”
The thickness of Candice’s farts was dominated only by that of the awkward air that hung between them.
“Th..n.k.. y..u” Candice said hushed enough that only a fractioned version of the thanks could be heard, though apparently it was still audible enough to be understood.
“You’re…welcome?,” the boy coughed, and wore a questioning smile as he did so “Be seein you, I guess-“
“CANDICE!”
The two snapped their heads around to face the fuming ball of fury rolling forward. The fraying thick of his wild-grown facial was, to Candice, the hide of a dishevelled wildebeest. Every worry she could ever conceive of on a day like this was falling into place, like the pieces of a jigsaw slotted into place by some cruel hand.
“Monty I - they were just”
“OH I’ll bet”
“No really they’re nobody, I was just-“
“You know I have a right mind to fire you right here and now”
He was a ball of fury, but his eyes glared cold into Candice’s own. Todd couldn’t help but feel responsible for the confrontation. Seeing the two side by side reinforced what he felt the moment he saw her ID - no, the moment she fell: the chick couldn’t catch a break. What was this geezer’s deal anyway?
“Hey dude she’s right, im just ‘bout to head back”
“Don’t call me ‘dude’,” his eyes clicked up to Candice and his weathered index finger jutted in her direction on each pause “I told her no breaks, no goofing off, no chatting with her friends-”
“I don’t fuckin’ know her! I was just givi-“
“Language you tyke!”
This guy was really starting to piss him off. And no breaks? On a day like this? What was he, a slave driver?
“Don’t ‘tyke’ me, geezer. I’m old enough to know there’s dogshit where there’s barking. There’s no reason you can’t treat your employee with respect”
“That employee can’t do the most basic things asked of her!”
Monty and Todd continued to exchange verbal blows, leaving Candice as the one caught bare in the argumentative crossfire. Should she interject? Or would she be pushing her luck to even open her mouth? All the stress compounding was not doing her stomach any favours either. She took the opportunity while the two dug into each other to attempt to leak something out.
PHSsss sss ss
Still, kiddo had a lip on him. She couldn’t imagine herself talking up to someone - a random stranger - with that kind of aggressive confidence, much less at that age.
sss ssss ss sssss
It was starting to really stink. The chomping pain in her gut was subsiding, but not nearly quick enough, and at a cost her nose was paying as the sulphury haze stuck like sticky vapour to all the walls of the suit’s interior. It was enough to make her feel green in the cheeks - and she was sure that, if there was a mirror in that canary-cage, she’d find her skin turned to all manner of alien discolourations.
Prrrrph sssrphh
Hnnng
Purring softly like a mountain cub, but as much a vicious killer as its mother, her anus expelled more hefty puffs of gas - ones with form and staying power. Had the two boys not been wrapped in their exchange of expletives and insults, there would’ve been no ignoring it. As much as confrontation wracked her… this had its positives.
PrrrBrllpp orpsssssrp
The gas needed out, and she needed to be more daring while she still had the opportunity. The purr split into a wet raspberry and then eased back into a soft coo, as if to bottleneck the boisterous choir before it sung too loudly. It took restraint to not hack like a madwoman on this new batch of soupy fartgas, as she was struck by a stench that took from the meaty quality of the meal it was sourced from. And soupy was accurate - she knew she hadn’t messed herself, but lord did the slick-wet walls of her asscrack make it feel like bubbling soup through a piping bag. She doubted that the stink would ever wash out.
“Listen you runt-“
Ppppbbblrrrrbllll
“No, you listen”
Phwweerrr
“Maybe don’t keep assuming the worst in people just because you’re so…you’re such…” the boy searched for something spiteful, something to pierce skin, “such a decrepit piece of -“
BBBrllppppBbbBBraalllp
An imposing wet tune bellowed from within the confines of the chicken suit, and all at once Candice found herself not caring about anything anymore as her eyes fluttered in post-partum ecstasy.
Brrrrlllllppppp brp brp brllllppfff
Montgomery stared at the girl as if he were an 18th century noble seeing the village slag do something deviant and unsavoury. This reaction of abject horror was also present in the boy, who, staring eyes-wide in the direction opposite to where she stood, tried to process what was happening behind him: 4 sequential blasts (longer, sloppier ones bookending sharper, squeakier ones) stringing out into the sweltering summer atmosphere with the same kind of dominating force as a bell tolling in its clocktower holding. His feet were planted to the ground, and he felt physically unable to swivel himself around, as if he were to come face to face with a modern medusa and her head of bone-snapping, venom-spewing snakes.
But of course he didn’t need to turn around for those snakes to coil around him, into his airways, and constrict his lung sacs.
The cloying stench of decaying meat and rotten eggs confirmed against all doubt what they had been getting errant whiffs of since the beginning, no doubt fracturing the two’s concept of how a girl should act, or what a girl is capable of producing. And yet, it could not compare to the sheer density of O’Connor ass-fumes that clouded the suit’s interior.
Fssssssslrp bllllrp brrrrrr-ulpp orrrrpppppp
Candice tilted her head back in absent bliss, eye’s closed. Her world was frozen, detached from that which surrounded her (which incidentally was also frozen as Monty, the kid and passersby stood still and silent for the putrid symphony). It felt like all the hardships of life were hissing and bubbling out of her asshole. She could no longer bring herself to care about how painfully warm the farts felt, or how nasty they smelt as the hot shit-air hit her nose in drive-by assault on the journey upwards. All that mattered was getting the thing that had been tormenting her all day - almost probing fun at her - out of her system. They couldn’t see it, but she had the goofiest expression, with smile lines, cheek dimples and all. And while her upper set of cheeks were puffed out, the set below the waist ‘puffed out’ something noxious enough to make dogs whimper and rats keel over, had there been any around.
rbbbbPPPllborpbblllflsrch bbblrp schrllchorpprrr
Even as she found herself hovering about the ‘danger-line’ she didn’t slow down - she crossed it with no hesitation. The damp atmosphere had made it so difficult to tell whether she was producing something gaseous or something more. Something that’d leave a visible mark. It had been a concern that ringed around her for hours, making every fart feel like a game of Russian Roulette, with the same risk of splatter. However now she not only found herself free from fate, but some growing part of her wanted to tempt it. The squelching, undulating fart she had just released only made her grin widen, as her head tilted back further, and further, and-
bomf
The chicken head patted the ground with a soft thump, and the sun glared down on her freckled white skin and grin of toothy whites.
And then silence persisted, complete and uncompromised.
The gaseous beast was now free from its binding. Free to roam the area where they stood like an ephemeral serpent, and was so dense it could slink low to the ground, refusing to rise and thin out. A boa ready to constrict its prey - a hydra ready to consume all that lay opposed to it. As exaggerated of an image as it might seem, it can’t be understated just how many of her farts had been circulating the suit for the past hour. With each release, the cloud grew thicker and thicker, the constituent molecules of her gas having less and less space to roam. To release that all at once was to uncage something heinous - something biblical.
Something diabolical.
Candice’s face, save for her eyelids slowly prying open to face the sun’s brightness (not once did they flutter), stood still in refusal. Refusal to process what she had just done, and refusal to acknowledge what was about to happen. At that moment, the entire scene would have looked like a still-life. Save for the boy, everyone was looking at her.
Then the coughing started.
Everybody who was already far enough away spared little time in getting out of the girl’s vicinity, and those who were closer, while just as eager to leave, found their heels nearly knocked over by the smell - their noses folding into themselves while their eyes squinted to the width of razors; one hand was clasping their face to block the stench, with the other frantically trying to waft it away. The mist creeped above the concrete, claiming an area of about 5 by 5 metres, and dissipating only slowly as it drew further out. The only two yet to break their catatonic trance were standing right in front of her.
Candice tilted her head back up; she looked straight into Monty’s wide, involuntarily twitching eyes, and could bring herself to say only two words while flashing a nervous grin and fidgeting her fingers.
“…excuse me?”
***
The bouts of shouting raged through the building behind him - all distinctly male and grouchy. Either the walls were thin, or the sound was so loud it threaded through the brick like cardboard.
“AND KEEP THE DAMN THING”
The sound of something slamming could be heard, and then an uncomfortable air took hold. People eating at their tables in the main part of the building exchanged murmurs he couldn’t decipher the contents of from outside. Better than silence, he supposed.
A door scraped open at the back of the building - Candice clearly not wanting to face the Gran Pollos jury by taking the straighter route to the double-doors at the front. The pat of footsteps grew louder as she approached. He’d considered waiting at the rear of the restaurant, perhaps listening in to the exact contents of the argument (he really couldn’t make out what she’d said over the older man’s much more imposing voice, so perhaps it was more execution than argument), but decided it would’ve come across as too weird and intrusive if she’d opened the door to see him and nobody else. Waiting for her as he was, slumped dopily against the wall leading to the building’s front-left edge, was already causing him to jitter with nervous energy. What would he say? What could he say? How would he say it? His want for fun and intrigue was all the reason she’d ended up this way. Maybe it would be best if he just left, he thought.
As he stewed in thought, Candice walked ahead of him - either she didn’t notice him, or she did and didn’t want to slow her pace. He couldn’t blame her.
“Hey, Candice!” he said, after mulling over whether it was better to call her by her first name, her last name, or neither.
The girl was drenched from the top of her matted bobcut to the tip of her wartorn trainers. He’d expected her to be dismissive of his call in an effort to get the hell out of there, but while her gaze wasn’t bubbly bright, it did maintain a sort of tired friendliness as her lips thinned into an attempted smile.
“Oh, hey. Whassup”
“I just” the boy searched for some new words, something to cleanse the air, “I’m sorry about what happened. If I wasn’t here it wouldn’t have-”
Candice cut him off
“Oh pff, you didn’t do anything,” Candice plopped the wet yellow mass onto the bike seat and gripped the handlebar, ready to walk alongside it “I’m pretty sure I was on the fast-track out of here anyway, so don’t worry about it kid”
Candice took the white card and waved it.
“I should be thanking you, who knows where it could’ve ended up” her look turned somber and she took a moment of her own “I should be sorry that you had to…witness what you did. I’m not usually like that. In fact I’m never like that-”
It was the boy’s turn to interject once he could feel the justifications creeping in. It was more than he really needed to know.
“I believe it, don’t worry,” the boy’s smile reflected back onto her, and her lips fattened out a bit into a more normal smile “shit happens, right?”
“Right!” Candice’s voice jumped to agree, then she dialed the energy back.
“...Right. Say, what’s yer name, squirt?”
”Todd.”
"Todd...I'm not great with names, but I'll remember it! I guess I don't need to tell you mine..." Candice furrowed her brow "say, what happened to your nose?"
"Shit happened" Ryan shrugged; it was best not to tell her how.
Candice chuckled at the retort.
“Well, Ryan,” she took her index and middle finger - stuck together as if they were one - nodded it against her temple, then towards him in the universal gesture for ‘have a good one’ “I’ll see ya around”
While it was comforting that Candice hadn’t expressed any outward resentment towards him, Todd still felt like he needed to make one last-ditch effort to absolve himself.
beep doodoo, beep doodoo
Both Candice and Todd turned to face Venien’s crown jewel as it struck the chord of 2 o’clock. 2 o’clock…
SHIT!
He had to get going now, or there was no way he would make it back before Dad. He rushed towards Candice as she’d begun to step away.
“Woah-hah, sure you wanna stand so close to me buddy?” Candice half-joked before she paused at the sight of what he was holding in his open palm.
A five dollar bill.
***
Candice gripped her newspaper in one hand while easing the bike along with the other, filing through the job listings and mentally checking off each thing she was hopelessly unqualified for. The faces of those who walked by her became ugly scrunches at the smell of her lingering fart-waft and body odour, but she kept her head down more than she kept it up.
No…no…yeh maybe when I’m 30…no…
The exercise felt hopeless, but it needed to be done. Just as she was about to earmark a page for later reading, she perked at the sounds of confrontation straight ahead. It was the newsagent from earlier. Subconsciously she’d retraced the route in reverse and it landed her right here. A claw of guilt tickled her guts as she figured the kid was probably getting chewed out by his boss; she took a step to cover herself with the width of the large wheelie bin that flanked the store.
On a second evaluation, the person doing the chewing didn’t seem old. They were clad in a neon-green hoodie. She couldn’t quite make out their face, but the pose was not that of a composed adult. A sense of unease and imminent danger, not unlike what she felt when her guts were fit to burst, started to whirl its way back in. The person in green - from an angle she was sure Ryan hadn’t seen from his vantage point - slowly slid out, by the hilt, something metallic and reflective from their hoodie pocket, before changing course and sliding it back in as an older man‘s voice could be heard from within the shop. The figure walked away.
Candice took a different route home.