The Alchemy of Imp Spray

“I kept a pair of imps caged for the better part of three decades as I scripted Volume Five of my series, Scent Languages of the Perverse. Every day the duo would fill the air from their glands as they communicated across the distance. I grew to understand the alchemy of their spray by standing in its path and allowing the fetid effluvium to wash over me.

Such wondrous effluvium. So potent. It hovers over me still.

Just as I had written the last page of what was to be my greatest work, the dialect of their spray changed entirely, rendering my findings useless. Oh, but how they laughed at my expense!

I know the smell of failure. It is the reek of thirty years’ worth of concentrated imp farts sprayed into one’s face, and the bitterness of having no academic recognition to show for it.”