It was on a Sunday that we first noticed the smell. We lived in an apartment on the third floor of a low-rise in Parkdale, right off Queen. It was one of the few affordable rental buildings left, constructed sometime in the seventies. No one built these anymore – now only condo towers time-lapsed into being on every empty lot in the city.
Anyway, on Sunday we stepped out of our apartment, walked down the hall and opened the door to the stairwell. We cantered down the stairs and it was around the first floor that I smelled it.
“What’s that poopy smell?” I said.
“Maybe somebody pooped in the mailbox,” John said.
“Thank you.”
We set off on our usual weekend walk. This walk started out westward, through the little streets with the big houses, cool and shaded by their tall trees. Then it was north on Roncy, where we carefully maintained our distance from the oblivious senior citizens pushing canvas shopping trolleys, and the sleepy bald babies with faces not entirely dissimilar from the former. Both parties were often accompanied by grinning, panting, dogs, turning their heads excitedly from side to side. From here it was west again, onto sunny, wide, High Park Boulevard. Groups of flushed people were walking back from the park, talking and laughing. Their voices sounded clear in the afternoon sun. Most groups had a dog, a stroller, a wailing toddler who stumbled melodramatically behind them, or some combination of the three.
After passing beneath the old park gate, we
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Rachel is an engineer based in Toronto. She spends her evenings and weekends writing in the hopes of altering the previous sentence. All that hoping makes her thirsty and she can often be found quenching her thirst at The Rex, The Rhino, or Grace O'Malley's.