The beginning

He smelled of the sea. 

 

Most people would think that sounds romantic, calling to mind salt spray and coconut.  But he actually smelled of the sea.  Like kelp and fish and longshoremen.  Like creaky boats and oil spills and islands of garbage floating across the waves.  Seriously, have you ever smelled a walrus?  He smelled of island cliffs covered in cormorant poop and lice covered seagulls.  He smell of chum.  He smelled brine and sun baked shores littered with rotting jellyfish corpses.

 

He stank.

 

And when he pull her close, ostensibly to shore her one of his more exotic tattoos, she did not draw away.  She nuzzled close to his fetid, malodorous, noisome, mephitic aura. 

 

Oh, were it not for one horrific, scent-blocking sinus infection Barnabas Oceanus Triton Aegir would never have been born.