The Stench
WIP (1 December 2026: 1st draft, 37% in) – #YA #Speculative #SFF – #ND #Own
Longlisted
2025 WestWord First Chapter Competition
Longlisted
2025 Page Turner Writing Award
‘Outstanding YA dystopian opening. Clever worldbuilding.’ ‘Great start! Interesting, fun premise, and I love the dialogue!’
‘I found the introduction of the protagonist’s details related to autism, the dads, and the soft toy really evocative – the representation of the sensory overwhelm/distress scene, in particular, is so good!’
Chapter 1
One in a Gazillion
Social media was buzzing with, It. The village of Stanton Drew’s prehistoric stone circle was ground zero, a platoon of mobile-device-educated epidemiologists decreed. Tin foil hats covered with beanies – so as not to be dismissed as #TinFoilHats –, they roused occupants of Stanton Drew’s sleepy white, thatched cottages when a fresh (pardon the perverse euphemism) case emerged among them. Tripling the town’s 781-population, plugging cures from dandelion tea to hyena poo enemas to twerking across standing stones.
That’s how I first heard of It: a meme of a hyena in a tree, dung bombing a wafting person underneath. I laughed, shrugged it off: the odds of being infected were one in half a million, too insignificant to hit traditional media headlines despite the illness’s bizarre manifestation.
One in half a million equalled one in a gazillion of anyone I knew catching it, I reckoned. Symptoms were embarrassing, but no one died.
Not of It, anyway.
Possibly of humiliation, but not of … It.
So when it happened at school, biology, of all places, despite all signs pointing to me, it had to be Dan on my right or Charisse in front of me. Or the science lab, next door: H2S demo gone wrong again.
Anyone or anything but me.
But Charisse dry heaved.
Dan shrieked, adding ten octaves to his post-break-voice, “StupidWeirdosgotit!”
“Don’t move, Chrissy.” Mrs Gherkin doesn’t call me Weirdo, unlike my classmates. “I believe… you’ve—” Retching sound.
“…caught—” More retching. Door slamming.
*
The Stench claims ‘fresh’ victim!
Seventeen-year-old A-level student, Chrissy Walker from Glowbridge, Kent, developed the distinctive piscine whiff during biology, causing a precipitous school run. ‘Smelled like rotten fish in a slurry pit,’ reports classmate Dan, who sat nearest to The Stench’s latest victim. ‘Big blue flies and maggots crawling all over her’…
I gagged. Not because of how I smelled. Okay, I smelled disgusting, of dead fish and chicken shit, but I gagged at the article that had appeared in the local blog-rag less than thrirty minutes after Mrs Gherkin slammed the door on me. I should have known better than to click the headline bait that appeared on my screen. And I should know better than to check social media next…
its just the weirdo 👽
🤣
she cried
weirds a baby
stinky baby🤢
🤮
Social media’s a bitch at the best of times, ’specially when you’re the class weirdo, but now… My mobile switched off. I gazed at the black screen, briefly, then wriggled around to stuff the thing in the pocket of my school uniform’s blazer. I shouldn’t read those things, anyway, it was only going to depress me more.
“Chrissy, sorry, please, the draft…”
Dad didn’t finish his sentence. He needn’t. The blanket he’d covered me with, to hide my presence on the backseat of his car, did nothing to stop the stench as my squirming about simulated an air freshener releasing a puff of decomposing fish and eggs gone off. Even with all the windows open, wearing two face masks (Dad not me), I heard the strain in his voice as he struggled to keep his stomach’s contents from antiperistalting up-and outwards. While, of course, reassuring me it wasn’t that bad. Poor Dad.
“Holy shit! That from…?! Hey, man, closeˈyer fucking windows or I’ll—” I peeked out from under my throw. A fist was banging our driver side window. I don’t know what ‘Hey Man’ would have done, because Dad floored it, turning a sharp, tug-and-toss right. He never jumps a light, and I’m sure he stuck to the Highway Code as always, even more since I started driving lessons, but I’d never heard our silver-grey Volkswagen’s wheels squeal like that.
“Are you okay, darling?”
That was a DadTed uncharacteristically ambiguous question. I wasn’t hurting, or shaken by Hey Man’s threats, nor by Dad’s driving. I was, however, secreting a stench so malodorous, no one would ever come within a mile of me ever again. Doomed. I was about to summarise those facts, when it hit me. Dad had turned right. We were speeding – DadTed style, hugging speed limits – in the opposite direction of home.
“Dad, where—?”
“Not now, darling.” Dad turned left, into a street significantly quieter than the main road we’d been on. “It’s… complicated, I need to concentrate.”
“But…” This wasn’t like DadTed. My dads trusted me, knew my tolerance threshold for uncertainty was pretty low. IU is the technical term, Intolerance of Uncertainty, common in people with ASD (that’s autism spectrum disorder). If we weren’t going home, then where? The GP? No that was the other way as well. Hospital? Or family? Unlikely, there wasn’t anyone but my dads and me. The blanket’s knotty pilling rubbed against my skin, irritating, chafing, burning. The darkness became oppressive. My fishy-shit smell, overwhelming. The hum of the motor swelled into a whine, grating my eardrums. My skin crawled, everywhere. I wanted to kick off my shoes, take off my socks, my blazer. Scratch myself. My brain and body turned into a mach-10 missile, seconds from detonation.
“Please, Dad, where—”
“Here, Sweety.”
I yelped at his voice, at his hand touching my clenched fists. Or possibly I shouted. I wasn’t sure, as my ears thrummed increasingly faster and more intense.
“Platy.”
I snatched my headphones and Platy away from Dad. Hugged him close. Squeezed his fat, soft flippers rhythmically. I know… I’m seventeen, too old according to popular opinion, for soft toys. But Platy helps me cope when disobliging sensory stimuli threaten to overload my autistic brain. My other dad, DadBarnaby, is good with needle and thread, and saves Platy’s life, and by extension my sanity, with bi-annual surgery. Platy and I thank DB (that’s what I call my dads in my mind, DB and DT, for brevity, or just ‘Dad’) by agreeing to a hair-raising circuit around the racing track, in his racing-green Mini Convertible, with Night Flash Spoke 2-tone wheels and a black retractable roof.
I kicked off my shoes. They tumbled to the floor. I pulled my socks off with one hand, holding on to Platy with the other. I wriggled out of my blazer, one arm after the other so that I could hold on to Platy. Listening to Debussy’s Claire de Lune on repeat, massaging Platy’s flippers, my head began to clear and my skin un-crawled, and I started to hypothesise.
One: ‘Why DadTed’s daring driving style?’ and,
Two: ‘Where we could possibly be going?’
I got as far as: we’re fleeing the country because—
I fell asleep, exhausted. Dead to the world.
End of Sample
