Midnight Skunk

I was recently woken out of a dead sleep by the smell of skunk coming through my closed, double-paned bedroom window.

I sniffed myself awake. Definitely skunk. “This is what happens when you feed the skunks,” I grumbled. “This will be just like when the house one street over stank of skunk for a week.”

I opened the front door and sniffed. Nothing but skunk. I opened the back door and sniffed. Overwhelming skunk.

I woke Gary up. “We have been skunked. It’s bad.”

Gary rolled over and sniffed. “Oh, I can smell it.”

It’s more probable that a) he wanted to shut me up or b) he’s so suggestible he would have said he smelled chimpanzee if I’d said that instead. Twenty minutes later he was in my room complaining he couldn’t sleep because the skunk smell was making his eyes water.

When I woke up the next morning, I sniffed both the front and back yards. No skunk.

“What a weirdly specific dream,” I thought, until I read the Facebook post Gary wrote at 1:30 the previous night, which was about how we’d been skunked.

So now a new mystery. Did a next door neighbors’ late-night visitor recently run over a skunk? Maybe a deer was sprayed by a skunk and circled our house? Ghost skunks? Mass hallucination? I don’t know.