The Sixth Circle of Hell
Forget you, Dante. We have found the sixth circle of Hell and it does not belong to the heretics, but to something far worse. Fair warning - This could get gross so I advise you to come back later if you are currently eating, have recently eaten, or plan to eat in the near future. We bought our house three years ago and have been relatively pleased with it except for one thing…the shower drain. There is a smell. You know what I’m talking about, that putrid rotten egg smell. Yeah, that. Only it’s not there all the time, usually our shower smells fine. Then one day I will turn the water on and reek comes wafting out the drain, making me gag and heave and fling myself out of the shower, dripping wet and with shampoo running into my eyes. We’ve had it snaked - nothing. We’ve tried all kinds of drain cleaners - nothing. I’ve dumped enough baking soda and vinegar down there to delight whole legions of Second Grade scientists. The smell will go away for a while but it always comes back, more fetid than ever. We’ve had the plumbing checked and everything looks okay; the pipes are the right size and are properly put together. I don’t get it. We’re relatively clean people we don’t, to my knowledge, pee in the shower. Why can’t we get rid of the smell? So on Saturday it was particularly rank and we decided to take desperate measures. We opened the drain ourselves. Well, Dan did, I was there for the moral support. He popped off the drain cover, reached inside with a pair of pliers…and started screaming. Of course, I screamed too and ran out of the bathroom. I whipped around in time to see Dan, army crawling through the doorway as fast as he could, still screaming. Army crawling, people! Whatever it was, it was so horrible that his survival instinct kicked in and told him that standing up would waste precious time. We sat there a while, sweating and shaking. (I think there was a little bit of mild swearing going on but this cannot be documented.) Dan had turned an interesting shade of green and sat with his head between his knees, I was sure he was going to either vomit or pass out - maybe both. After we had regained our composure, we crept back in. We inched closer to the shower, peered toward the drain and…it was not that bad. An itty, bitty hair clog that still looked like hair, it hadn’t even fermented into that vile, black goo. “That?” I looked at Dan incredulously. “You were screaming because of that?” He did one of those full body shudders. “It wouldn’t let go of the pliers! It was scary!” We flushed out the drain with the garden hose and put more Liquid Plummer down there, but this morning when I showered, the smell was back. And the pipes started making a strange groaning noise. There’s something in there and it’s angry. It’s only a matter of time before it comes for us.
One Response to “The Sixth Circle of Hell”
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June 6th, 2006 at 2:16 am
That was hilariously, laugh out loud funny!! “Army crawling, people!” Love it!