A few years ago, I took a contract job in New Hampshire. I needed an inexpensive place to stay as I would be splitting my time between Texas and the Northeast. A friend of mine offered to rent me a spare room in his house near Portland, Maine; and although I would be facing a more than hour-long commute to the office, the price was right.

My friend had just acquired one other roommate, who I was not to meet until I moved in. I was concerned that she would not appreciate sharing her space with yet another stranger.

“So, your other roommate is okay with my taking this room, right?”

“Of course. She’s pretty nice. She mostly keeps to herself though. I hardly ever see her.”

My friend Jim* was at least partly right. When I moved in, Rebecca would shut herself in her room, not to emerge for days on end. I would occasionally see her when she left for or returned from work, or even more rarely preparing food in the kitchen which she would then carry, dimpled arms over-laden, back into her room. Despite her scarcity (and mine), Jim and I soon began to notice things.

First was the smell. Standing next to her, her glands seemed to emit an aroma so strong that it was more a forcefield than an odor; and the trail she left in her wake as she crossed the room was sometimes faint, and sometimes overwhelming. The smell itself was difficult to describe, but was a combination of rotting flesh, stale chum, and plain ol’ BO. Suffice to say, it was really bad, like a smell specifically engineered to stop an enemy in its tracks.

Although the door to her room was usually shut, passing by when she opened it was akin to facing the gates of hell in nasal form. This is not an exaggeration.

Rebecca was a large woman, of Lebanese descent. She had some family issues, and her own young son lived with her parents for reasons that were unclear. In any case, she brought to her room quite a few African-American men of varying moral aptitude for personal gratification purposes. She explained at one point that black men were the only guys who would pick up on her because of her size, and it was unclear whether she resented this, merely accepted it, or genuinely liked them.

One night Jim and I were watching television in the living room, and a younger paramour of Rebecca’s struggled out of the death smell room. He plopped himself down in front of the television, glancing back towards her door every few minutes, as if genuinely afraid of her. When Rebecca emerged, she seemed displeased that her male friend was spending less time with her than with us. Another day, one guy, invited into her room, spun right around, saying, “Naw, man, I don’t like your incense.”

Rebecca’s early hours meant she was usually the first one to shower and leave the house. One morning after she was gone, I was about to step in the shower when I happened to look down. The bathroom in Jim’s house was not the most pristine (I seemed to be the only one who cleaned it, and I had only just arrived) but that day there was a little extra clump of detritus down by the drain. Feeling a little impatient about Rebecca’s hygiene, I grabbed some toilet paper and bent to wipe it up. On closer examination, I realized that the clump was a little pile of human poop and hair.

I wish I could say this was the only time either of us found feces in the tub. We even developed a code name for them, to alert one or the other as to the presence of BLTs (brown little treasures). While you might think this would be the worst possible attribute in a roommate, it was about to get a whole lot worse.

“Um, hey Alix, can you come here?”

Jim’s voice sounded high and strained, which was not a good sign. When I emerged from my room, he was standing by the bathroom, pressed up against the wall. He was looking down at the carpet. I stooped down to look.

There were footprints leading from the bathroom to Rebecca’s room, decreasing from medium to light brown along the way. There was a darker smudge right in the middle of the heel, just as if…as if…

I looked up at Jim in shock and horror.

“No way.” I started to laugh, because really, what else can you do when your roommate tracks her own crap across the floor?

“It’s in the tub, too.”

You might think that this would have been the last straw, and that the next shit in Jim’s house would be the one hitting the fan as he evicted Rebecca. But a couple of weeks passed, and there was no sign that Jim had sat Rebecca down for “the talk”.

“What’s up, man? You told Rebecca yet?” I admit that, living there, I was concerned about her mental stability.

“No, I haven’t seen her around.” The next time I asked: “Oh, I haven’t had the time.” The next time: “Uh…”

I could tell that Jim was nervous about talking to Ms. BLT, but I wasn’t sure what to do about that. I was the newest roommate, and it was Jim’s house. On the one hand I could understand his reticence. First of all, how do you broach the topic? “Hey, Rebecca, I’ve noticed that you’ve been pooping in the tub lately.” “So, house meeting: who tracked her own poop across the carpet?” Second of all, like me, Jim was concerned about confronting someone who would do such a thing. Without, apparently, realizing it (although maybe she did know what she was doing, which was even scarier). Would she stab him in the thigh with a butter knife? Fill her closet with excrement?

On the other hand, who knows where she would poop next.

Finally, Jim got around to telling Rebecca she “needed to clean up after herself”. Poop was not specifically mentioned, but it seemed she got the hint. Whether by blessed coincidence or through sheer embarrassment, Rebecca moved out a month later. As a favor for which Jim is still in debt, I helped him clean her room. The odor that had decreased in importance with the advent of the BLTs had soaked into the walls, which I scrubbed with a solution of bleach and water. Three times.

Not too long after, my contract ended and I moved out also. I wished Jim luck in finding his next roommate.

He was going to need it.

*names have been changed to protect the mortified.