There’s No Mask For That
you can’t mask the stench
of hatred that denies a
death with dignity
for her own mother
elder abuse: narcissist
smiling cruelly
About four years ago, I had an ironic conversation about deodorant with a hater, a year before I witnessed the full extent of her putrid stench. 
She’d heard I was using aluminum-free deodorant, and so this one who’d bragged for years about her own natural childbirth without any medicines whatsoever and had made the same autocratic decision to withhold all medicines from her mother so she could allow her to die a full-pain cancer death like there’s some sort of trophy for that, struck up a conversation with me.
“So you use natural deodorant,” she informed me, gossip-style, as if I didn’t already know this about myself. I’d only mentioned this to a few friends, so I knew the source of her information immediately. I’d made the switch after a mutual friend was diagnosed with breast cancer.
“I do,” I nodded.
“What kind?” she asked.
“Native.”I’d tried most all the popular brands, but I wasn’t sharing my research.
“Do you like it?”
“I do.” I was keeping my answers short, since conversations with her were awkward and generally nothing but her attempt to gain some kind of ammunition or put someone down.
She looked lost on what to ask next, and I’ll never know what prompted her to take the direction she did, but I’ve wished a thousand times I could go back to that moment and answer her next question a different way.
“So how do you put it on, is it like just maybe three pulls?” This fifty-ish year old woman seemed genuinely confused, as if she’d never used deodorant a day in her life. I wasn’t sure whether to offer to demonstrate how to apply deodorant to the armpits or settle into my suspicion that she ain’t never been quite right, or both. So I settled for her proof of truth.
What I said was “Yes.” And this ended her interrogation..
What I wished I’d said was, “Actually, it’s a little more complicated than your Sure or your Secret or whatever you already use that isn’t working anyway. What you have to do to figure out the number of natural deodorant pulls is first determine the surface area of the solid that actually makes contact with the pit. Then, you use calculus to account for the slope of the solid at the edges if it’s curved, and also take into account whether you are applying it to recently shaved pits, pits shaved two or three days ago, or no-shave Novemberish pits because the hairs actually will hold odor, and they need an extra pull if they’re more than a middle fingernail long. Once you have the surface area of the deodorant calculated, next you need to determine the surface area of your actual pits, using your current clothing size, multiplied by the centimeters squared of the area needing application, and then take the hypotenuse of the cup size of your bra and divide it by the exponent of the pit area. Multiply this by the number of ounces in the deodorant container, and then take the square root of the deodorant’s surface area, multiply it by two for two pits, or (but not and) then divide it in half to account for one pit, and that should give you the number of pulls to apply. It varies by individual.” 
I wish I’d blinked hard and cocked my chin to see if she could even do that kind of math.
Common Threads 