Paper Mill?

Today I smelled a smell I ain't smelled in a long time. If I ain't mistaken it's coming from that paper mill down in Louisiana. The facility is located some sixty miles away, as the crow flies, but we used to get a whiff of it two or three times a year. I reckon it was ten years ago when they come up with a new technique for producing their product that eliminated the use of sulphur. It was the sulphur was gave the air a rotten egg aroma. Today that same odor came floating in upon us here in Harper. I have been trying to figure it out all day. Did they go back to the old method? Did some old employee who got fired come back and gum up the works in an act of revenge? Is there another paper mill maybe off in another direction that's still using sulphur? Or is it something entirely different? A new industry? Some kind of barnyard smell?

I asked Dorothy if she smelled it and she said she didn't know what I was talking about. She couldn't smell a thing. She told me I must be smelling my upper lip. I don't think I heard that little insult since I was in the fifth grade, but I laughed anyway. I asked around town and nobody seemed to have detected anything in the air. I did get about six upper lip jokes. Now I am beginning to believe it was my imagination. I have heard of people seeing things and hearing things, but never of people smelling things. I am a little worried.

Tales of Harper, short stories and poems about the fictional town of Harper, Mississippi is available on Amazon Kindle