My family moved a lot, as us three brothers grew up. We lived in half a dozen places in France, four in Canada, and three in the US.
At one point, two of us had to move from Toronto to Paris in a hurry, and crashed at some relatives' place. Briefly put, the mother of the family was a bitter blockhead.. bigotted and *****y. She knew, as everyone did, that we'd not be staying for more than a month or two, and yet couldn't help but be a real bastard to us, in ways only batty, battered old women can - case in point: she fed my cat rat poison.
I buried that cat the next night, in a plastic bag and carboard shoebox, while a big Husky halfbreed contended his territory from 15m out.. I couldn't even stay and have a thought for my cat. Throwing rocks at the beast would probably just have pissed it off, so I left promptly.
And she had justification, too. We stank up her basement. "What's that
smell?", one of their little daughters asked. "It's the
boys, my dear", she'd automatically answer.
Obviously, I was stripped of all chaff emotions and values. No pity or petty considerations were had, I wasn't just going to have a tit for tat revenge.. This ***** was going to be grilled to ashes by nothing less appropriate in retribution than her own bile.. I just needed to find how.
Luckily, fate would take care of that for me...
You see, the smell downstairs came not from our small room, but from another bigger stocking room where all the food, perishable and not, was kept, nice and tidy, packed from floor to ceiling, over about 600 square feet.
"The smell" came from a small aperture in one of its walls, one separating that room and another next to the outside garden, used for piano practice and hot summer afternoon naps, from the innards of the house, the water pipes, drainage pipes, and of course the poop tubes.
For a few months, probably, their excrements had leaked out of some underground break at the bottom of the partition, to the point that it shored up and leaked out through that food storage wall; #1, #2, tampons, periods, hangover spills, autogenetic flora and fauna.. you name it, it was floating in there.
We had, with the help of the now even more placid and cowardly heedless husband, to break the outside wall of the contaminated partition, and shovel all of it out, and across the piano room's floor, to buckets and any containers we found. It took about 4 or 5 hours.. and I can remember having trouble believing my nose even after a whole hour of digging the stuff - the smell was like standing in a furnace.
We filled the containers and made two trips to the local public dump in a rented truck... meanwhile the Baroness of BS was sitting on her fat ass, in the warm comfort of the house, distracting her daughters with compelling moralities on the whole affair.
A week later I found another place to stay for my brother and I; we promptly left.
On our way out, Her most proficient big bellybutton found Her way to our taxi cab just before it was leaving, for some token goodbye, or something. I had pulled down my window expecting someone else from the corner of my eye, and she must have gotten confused about something, because when our eyes met she just stood still.
I would have said something, but out of politeness, I held back from laughing my lungs out..
The look on her face: PWNED!!
