Passing Gas

A short story

Heinz Baked Beans advertisement, 1890

Having explained the Nature and Essence of a Fart, I shall next inquire the ill consequences of suppressing it, which must be obvious to everyone's experience; for, in its retrogradation, it causeth cholics, hysterics, rumblings, belchings, spleen, etc.

-The Benefit of Farting Explained, published in 1803

Angela Wagner wedged her hands on her hips, narrowed her eyes, stomped, and said, “That’s it. No more. I’m fed up with your spontaneous, irrelevant farts.” She’s suffered through a long day of useless meetings at the advertising agency where she worked and wasn’t in the mood to put up with her husband’s antics.

She let the cooking pot she was holding slam onto the burner, reached for a metal spoon, and then banged the spoon against the pot’s sides as she stirred the onion soup. The halogen streetlamp light streaming through the kitchen window gave the soup a ghostly glow, as if she were stirring a poisonous brew.

“Irrelevant?” Sal asked. “What do you mean?” He retrieved an Anchor Steam from the fridge, popped open the can, took a sip, and raised an eyebrow. He was grilled by his boss at the insurance company for an hour this afternoon about his productivity level and needed more beer and less complaining from his wife.

“What I mean is that if you’re going to fart, just step outside or do it in the bathroom like a normal person.” Air whistled through the gap between her front two teeth, summoning their half-poodle, half-labrador, Halsey. She petted Halsey’s head and continued, “See, your stinky farts attract the dog. But the stench repels me.”

“Halsey came because you whistled. But you know what? It’s a compliment to attract a dog.”

“It’s gross.”

“I’ve been farting my entire adult life. I think you know that about me.”

“No, Sal. You started farting in front of me the day our honeymoon ended. You never farted in my presence while we were dating, which says a lot.”

“I should have.”

“I never would have married you, let alone gone out with you, if you had.” Angela squeezed her lips tight.

“Maybe you shouldn’t have married me then.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have.” Her eyelids fluttered and her face paled, like somebody had suddenly applied a coat of ultra-white paint. Angela gripped her stomach and doubled over. She yelled, “Oww!” Her skin turned red, then ashen, and she screamed again.

“What’s the matter?”

“My stomach. I have a sudden pain, the worst, I…I—can’t move. Can’t breathe.” Her dripping sweat pounded their floor.

Sal darted to her from the other side of the kitchen, took her hand, wrapped his other arm around her waist, and guided her out of the kitchen to the couch. “Sit, sit—or maybe lay down, babe. Just lay down. I’ll call nine-one-one. You’ll be okay.”

As she staggered—wondering if she’d die before the ambulance arrived, before she even got to the couch, if the last picture taken of her would be a coroner’s photo of her dead on the transom between the two rooms—the pain is off the scale!—her legs wobbled and she bent over even more, so extreme that she resembled the letter C.

Another agonizing step, followed by another, and then—

Angela farted, a flatus so loud that the vase on their coffee table cracked, and three paintings hanging on their living room wall threatened to leap into space.

Sal covered his ears, but it was too late. His ears rang like he’d been standing next to a howitzer.

A second later, their apartment smelled like a garbage landfill, and a second after that, Halsey came running and shoved his nose against Angela’s butt.

“Oh wow,” Angela said. She smiled. “I feel better. I feel fine. I needed that fart.”

Sal grinned in reply. “See, that’s what I’ve been telling you.”

Angela kissed his cheek. “I understand now. I get it.” She took his hand and led him to the bedroom where they made wild, passionate love.

The following morning Angela and Sal quit their respective jobs. They sold their expansive Fifth Avenue apartment and moved into a one-bedroom rental in Duluth, Minnesota. They wanted to devote all their time, and especially all their money, to what they knew would be the most remarkable human liberation movement in history: Liberate the Fart.

Despite spending millions, and hiring Grayson Advertising, New York’s premier advertising agency, their movement gained no traction. Most of Liberate the Fart’s support came from college-age boys, which was not going to change anything.

Then, on August 19, 2027, in Washington, DC, during a joint press conference with British Prime Minister Hascomb Withings, the president of the United States, Vivian Grace, let loose a fart so enormous her dress flew up nearly to her waist.

The reputationally taciturn British Prime Minister snickered, and then in a moment of total loss of self-control, cut the cheese so loud that the Secret Service agents in the room drew their guns and shielded the president with their bodies.

The next day, President Grace invited Angela and Sal to join her administration as Special Advisors on Human Gas. Angela and Sal suggested an idea so bold as to seem on the far side of sorcery, but the president accepted the challenge, and in less than a year, America became the first nation to enjoy a fleet of flatulence-powered blimps. Instead of using explosive hydrogen or expensive helium, fart gas kept these blimps aloft, transforming the American transportation system.

Soon, America deployed fart-powered trains and autos, too. Most everyone thought the seat design of these new cars, with holes for gas, was clever and practical.

Many Americans’ standard of living grew, too, because people could go to twenty-four-hour fart collection centers where government workers fed them beans and cabbage while offering free Netflix and doling out a hundred-dollar bill with each fart. The machines that converted farts to fuel utilized a network of silvery palladium-coated pipes and catalytic oxidizers controlled by crystalized scandium integrated circuits. Miles of interior piping and thousands of exposed computer circuits inside the fart collection centers dazzled people into producing prodigious quantities of vapor.

On January 30, 2030, on the eve of her second term as president (having defeated her opponent 530 electoral votes to eight,) a jubilant President Grace met with Sal and Angela in the Oval Office.

“Have we done everything we can? We’ve reversed the stigma of farting, transforming it into a magical tool that powers America’s and many other countries’ economies. Now, when somebody farts, people don’t cringe or shrink away, make crude comments or smirk in disgust; instead, they smile and take their vacuum-flatulence flask to collect as much of the fart as they can, which they use at home for cooking and myriad other tasks. The nation and world are grateful, but I wonder: Can we do more? Are there uses for farts we haven’t considered or minds we still have yet to change?”

Angela knew who the president was talking about: The British. Despite the Prime Minister’s apparent glee on that seminal August day in 2027, the United Kingdom never adopted farting. Indecorous. Vulgarity over propriety, the Brits said. Neither had Luxembourg, Singapore, Monaco, Palau, or Chile embraced farting. China had in the west, but not in the eastern part of the country. Go figure.

Angela gazed at the painting of George Washington.

That blissful smile, she thought. He was probably farting when his portrait was drawn.

“Madam President, let’s organize World Fart Day.”

The president pondered, stroking her chin. “Meaning what?”

“We’ll coordinate a time when all humanity farts simultaneously.” She clapped and rubbed her hands together.

Sal seized the idea and continued, “On World Fart Day, America will launch human gas-powered phones. People may not care about dirigibles and autos, especially if they don’t travel, but everyone has a phone, and when they learn about self-sustaining, fart-powered phones, they’ll change their tune.”

“You mean change their toot.” The president chuckled. “I’ve been briefed on these new phones, a collaborative endeavor between Google and the National Institute for Standards and Technology. All people need to do is sit on their phone, fart once, and that will provide enough energy to power the phone for twelve hours. Given that the average person farts twenty times a day, these phones are genius.”

The president slipped slightly to the left to center herself over the hole in the two-hundred-year-old chair behind the Resolute Desk. Beneath the chair was palladium-coated pipe connected to the White House’s fart-powered energy system. The president’s chair was one of eleven hundred twenty-six White House chairs that collected farts.

She sighed and released her eighth fizzle of the day.

The president set World Fart Day on May 31, 2030. On that day at 11 a.m. Eastern time—midnight in Tokyo, 5 a.m. in Paris, noon in Rio, 6 p.m. in Cairo, 1 p.m. in Sydney—everyone would fart, and not just fart, but have saved it up for as long as they could. The president encouraged people to consume cheese, legumes, corn husks, beer, oat bran, onions, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, and, hoping to promote an American product, Heinz Baked Beans, in the days before the appointed hour.

Parades filled the world’s cities during the week leading up to World Fart Day. (None of the parades needed wind instruments for their marching bands for obvious reasons.) Politicians gave speeches, bragging about their gas-making prowess. Toy companies sold out of farting dolls.

Then, at precisely 11 a.m., eight billion butts expelled a mixture of hydrogen, methane, hydrogen sulfide, methanethiol, dimethyl sulfide, nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide at ten feet per second. Though subsonic, the sheer volume of gases had an additive, then multiplicative, then logarithmic effect, achieving subsonic, then supersonic, and finally hypersonic speeds. The gas molecules collided with extraordinary force, releasing unfathomable energy, causing the nuclei of the atoms to fuse, turning the Earth into the solar system’s second star, and extinguishing all life.

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If you enjoyed Passing Gas, I think you’ll also like my story, How Jackie Brill Ended the World.

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