Miracles Have a Rank Odor

We arrived at the Chinese buffet with dour spirits and weary hearts. The week had slouched by and my family crash landed on Friday in a fiery wreck. As always, I was first in the restaurant, expecting the delicious smells of the food to wrap around my nose and caress my face with its warmth and its seductive promise of simplicity – no equations, no tropes, no chemical formulas, just a simple process of spoon and fork to mouth.

I was not disappointed in that aspect, but even the sight and smell of the mouth-watering food could not alleviate the scars obtained from the past week. My heart plummeted; my attitude with it. I shuffled towards our designated table and sat down with a saturnine face. I had pinned all my hopes on the food being our savior.

The waiter asked for what we would like to drink.

“Water,” I attempted to say cheerfully, but instead came out bitter and morose. The tone of my voice elicited a sharp look from my parents, but nothing more.

Tension settled around the table like a wool blanket, and began to constrict my family. But I couldn’t find it within myself to do anything. Something within me broke – the idea that a part of the reason family existed was to share the pain, to shoulder each other’s burdens. What I saw before me was not a family, but strangers. Strangers who did not love each other.

Time cruelly slowed to a halt, and gleefully watched us wallow in our own miserable experiences from the past week. There seemed to be no end, and the obsidian marble darkly reflected my own dismal expression back at me. My family needed a miracle, I thought.

Then, my little brother dispelled the aura of dread with one swift action, literally blowing it away. He giggled, unabashedly so, and proceeded to rip out a very loud, obnoxious gust of wind. I jerked in my seat as an invisible cloud of gas penetrated my sense of smell. Eyes watering, I proceeded to gag.

My mother – viewing the clapping five-year-old and me, the choking, slowly dying sixteen year old, couldn’t help a grin crack her face, and glowed with amusement. My father also had a smile quirked on his face. I eyed them both with feigned annoyance at their apparent joy at my expense.

Then we all erupted into earsplitting laughter that turned heads within the restaurant. I cracked my side, tears streaming down my face, and my little brother sat there with a bemused expression on his face until he, too, joined in the euphoric release of tension. Later, I would find it funny that a rotten smell had made a rotten week seem not so bad.

I believe that miracles can come in any shape, size, sound – and, occasionally when the need arises, in the form of a ghastly smell.