Fabuloso
By: Richard Pels
Sandy was miserable because they were selling the apartment. Her misery was expressed in Fabuloso, breathing it nonstop for a week. It made her woozy. She reeked of the stuff, especially her hands. Ken knew it couldn’t be good for her.
She stuck her head in a kitchen cabinet and spray, spray, sprayed that purple stuff, and rubbed the paint until every spec of grease and a noticeable amount of paint came off. All Ken saw of her was her ass in yoga pants. Everything looked nice enough when she was done. But it stank, and the paint was tacky to the touch after all that scrubbing. Ken told her the roses smell of Fabuloso makes him gag. He was allergic to roses. The label said ‘larga aroma duradero”, large lasting scent. The house smelled like a truck stop air freshener.
Sandy cried when her head was in the cabinets, tears mixing with Fabuloso.
She was running out of Fabuloso. Ken felt a need to help. He impetuously volunteered to go for more even though he hated Fabuloso. Not to mention that he never seemed to bring home what Sandy considered the right thing.
Fabuloso is bargain priced. Its label is in Spanish. It’s surprisingly hard to find in the neighborhood since the plague. It works well, if you don’t mind the odor, and you save 73 cents over comparable English labeled products also made by Colgate Palmolive. There might be people for whom that savings is meaningful. Ken and Sandy weren't in that category, however she swore by it.
Everything, even the air, had a layered smell of roses. Ken wheezed; he had headaches, couldn’t get Fabuloso out of his clothes, his hair. His kids smelled like roses. His wife’s skin smelled. Their bedroom had the ambience of a janitor’s closet. He'd wake to see her scrunched over to the side of the bed he didn’t visit, with a big rose scented pillow over her face, as if she were trying to suffocate herself. Sometimes he checked to make sure she was breathing. He decided it must be harder to kill someone with a pillow than people are led to believe.
His impulsive offer led him out into the neighborhood. He went to several stores. Everyone was sold out of purple Fabuloso, the one she needed. He had to call Sandy up and say he couldn’t find it, just couldn’t find it. It was sold out. Everywhere. Must be a lot of depressed people cleaning.
When he called her, he put her on speaker because the ear part of his phone was broken, and he had been told it couldn’t be repaired. He doesn’t want to buy a new phone. He put it off for months, like his missing tooth. The tooth is far enough in the back so people can’t see it. His dentist is worried. He said the tooth above is dropping. “Not much I can do about it,” Ken said. “I’m not made of money.” The dentist said, “smells like you’re made of industrial cleaner. What’s that about?”
He had Sandy on speaker, prepared for a manifesto of disappointment to pour out of the phone. When his phone is on speaker, strangers can hear it. They can hear her disappointment. They give Ken a curious look. He’d be sprinting to someplace where he could have a little privacy, maybe a brownstone basement entrance, or an alleyway.
In the Walgreens, he scoped out an uninhabited place by the dog food just in case she gets loud. Nobody buys dog food in Walgreens, because why would they? However, she’s not surprised he can’t find Fabuloso. He hears calmly, “Did you look on that shelf under the Magic Eraser scrubbers?” the Magic Erasers happen to be across from the dog food.
He says "Yes, I’m looking at the Magic Erasers now." He sees 3 kinds of non-spray Fabuloso, green, red, yellow, but not purple. They all say on the back something about not using as a refill for the spray because they’re different formulas, “No use como relleno para el spray.” His Spanish is store Spanish, menu Spanish. It's like chili relleno, but it means filled here, not stuffed: do not fill the spray bottle. She says, “Did you try ShopRite?” He says, “Yes the selection was smaller. They only had piso cleaner Fabuloso." He knows piso means floor from “Piso mohado” signs. This place has two other kinds of Fabuloso. He doesn’t know what they’re for, but they say on the back “no use el spray.” Is there no Spanish word for spray? There must be.
She doesn’t get angry. In fact she goes out of her way to say she’s not. She doesn’t know he’s standing there with his finger on the volume-down button, eyeing the dog food, but she doesn’t get angry. He suggests he look at other stores. She says, “No it’s okay, I’ll go myself, scour the neighborhood for it.” He says, “Was that a pun?” She says, “Not intentionally.”
He gets home and takes a deep breath outside the apartment to get air not corrupted by Fabuloso. Maybe she’s making the place toxic so it’s easier to leave. He goes inside. She’s already gone, scouring the neighborhood. She’ll return soon with several spray bottles of Fabuloso. She always finds it.
He tries to do some packing, but he just moves things around. He finds two drawings by his ex-wife. He doesn’t like to look at them often. He keeps them in an envelope between two cardboards. They’re charcoal and chalk, black, white and sienna. She's a real artist, and the pictures are absurdly flattering, like drawings of a conquering hero or a god. He does not believe he could ever have really looked like that; He feels those portraits capture the exact moment when infatuation and love intersected but were more about the moment than about him. They capture a moment decades ago. Perhaps she hoped to show him what she wanted from him, this was the version of him that she wanted to be with, which he put in an envelope in a drawer under other things and only gazed at on occasion and was shocked every time by the impossibility. Drawings like that, out in the open, were a rebuke.
He decides to go to the Y to work out. The Y smells like Lysol, not Fabuloso. Lysol smells like iodine mixed with rocket fuel, but he'd welcome that smell right now. He borrows Sandy’s iPad to watch a movie.
He uses the spotty gym wifi to watch a film about a handsome, successful spy while he runs in place. At a moment the spy was in trouble, the sound dips, indicating an incoming communication.
The dipped sound makes him miss a line of dialog. On the screen little text boxes appear. He tries not to read Sandy’s texts, which, besides being private are always boring. Whatever this one said, her reply was, ‘Too poor to part.’ This one isn't boring. He wonders if she came up with that. It’s a good line. Maybe it's a meme she's borrowed. He doesn’t stop running. When he looks at what he’s doing, he's drenched in sweat and sprinting.
The movie continues like nothing else is important. The hero kills somebody, but Ken's not all that interested. He doesn’t understand why that guy was killed. He thinks about air that doesn't smell like Lysol or Fabuloso.
He doesn’t shower. He wears the sweat-soaked shirt out into the street. People waiting for a light discretely move away from him. He feels powerful. He passes the Equinox, an expensive gym. The moist scent of soothing herbs and perfumes wafts out of the entrance beckoning him to come in. He reluctantly resists.
He stinks. It’s not an ordinary sweat smell, his shirt has come alive. It's a huge, unwelcome hug of a smell, like being in a boxing gym's locker room, or walking by a backed-up sewer. The smell belongs to his dark green t-shirt with holes in it. He meant to throw it out. Maybe the dye gives bacteria an encouraging environment, a foothold for survival. He washed it four times. It still smells. He's intoxicated by the odor. It's buoyant, tenacious, aggressive.
In his building again, soon to not be his building, a woman gets on the elevator with him. He doesn’t know her. She looks at him. He can tell she wants to say, 'Jesus, what’s with that smell? How did a homeless person get in this building?'
He says, “Great weather we’re having!” Surprised that someone so malodorous could chit-chat, she says, “Oh, yes, perfect.”
The door opens and Ken strides out saying, “Fabuloso!” leaving behind a rude, organic smell.
Richard Pels received his MFA from the University of Oregon. His short story “Miching Mallecho” is in the current issue of Post Road Magazine. He wrote the libretto for “Suit”, an opera that debuted in the 2019 NYU First Performance Series. His poetry and prose have appeared in The Northwest Review, The Little Magazine and The Wisconsin Review. He is currently working on a novel, “I Heart Darkness,” and a screenplay, “Spyhoppers.” He freelances and teaches at the School of Visual Arts in NYC. Website