Marissa Hebert hated her job. She hated the patients she bathed, fed and pushed around the home. She hated how they repeated the same stories, with the same amount of enthusiasm several times each day. She hated hearing about their operations and how their grandchildren were performing so well in school. She hated their smell.
When her shift ended she rushed home, stripped off her clothing and crammed all of it in a large plastic storage bin then took a forty minute shower. When the smell of her clothes rubbed off onto the plastic bin and wafted out of the laundry room she shut the door and stuffed a towel in the crack underneath it.
If she saw the elderly in her peripheral vision when she was shopping after work she remembered the stench. She remembered the sound of percussive phlegm, and the sight of that horrible brown trickle of loose bowels in looser adult diapers. The synesthesia made her stomach hurt. Her reaction to people on the cusp of old age was almost as bad. When she glared out of her car window at a woman, who must have been fifty nine, in the next lane at the traffic light she felt her face scowl.
"Soon I'll have to shove that bitch down the hall. She'll complain about a two degree difference in room temperature. She'll rattle on and on about the wonderful things she did when she was my age."
The light changed. Marissa accelerated away, leaving her future patent behind and swatted the rear view mirror to keep weak headlights from reflecting into her face.