Suspended in that hazy frontier between sleep and awareness, I came awake at 3 a.m., not with the realization that something didn’t smell right, but rather that I am dying. I had been skunked. Inside my apartment, from under the floorboards.

Between rubbing my burning eyes into a bloodshot jelly and struggling to find a breath’s worth of oxygen, I hatched what, at the time, seemed a brilliant plan: I smeared toothpaste in my nostrils and hid under my comforter.

I thought I would easily regain the mental tranquility required to fall back to sleep, but instead endured hours of an unhappy existence breathing steamy recycled air while my nose slowly burned, not only with the acrid fog of the six skunks that lived under my floorboards but now with a brilliantly abrasive minty-freshness.

The next day I aired out my apartment and that night somehow rationalized my way back into bed. When the stirrings in the floor began again at bedtime, first with an inexplicable tumbling noise, then a violent digging sound, I simply went into denial. At 2 a.m. this denial once again became untenable as it was clear that the spraying party was well under way. In the several reruns of this episode that followed over the next few weeks I developed a hardened attitude towards the bumbling, nearly blind mammals.

At one point, when my apartment’s furnace broke, the repairman refused to service it because of the smell.

The skunks had violated a pact. I had known they lived under my floor for weeks and as long as they didn’t bother me I was willing to let them live. This strategy had failed the previous winter with a different species. After several attempts at intimidating a group of mice living in my walls by banging pots and throwing whiffle balls at them when they meekly poked out their heads, the mice began to peaceably assemble on my kitchen floor. They resembled a miniature Tahrir Square, calling attention to the fact that their human emperor had no clothes.

Well, no more. This time traps would be set and the skunks would be eliminated. In the meantime, to preserve my sanity, I had to move out.

While away I was relieved to learn from the skunk exterminator that a seemingly endless procession of skunks was being caught. Great. I wanted them gone, out of sight and out of mind.

But when I dropped by my apartment one day, still just a visitor and after a rare snowfall, I paused as I stuck my key in the front door. To my left curled in the corner of one of the cages huddled a shivering and forsaken wet ball of fur. I couldn’t bring myself to look closer at my sworn enemy. Vulnerable, confused, and capable of suffering, this was plainly obvious, the miserable animal, the very same that had poisoned my apartment and brought me to a near delusional state of insomnia, revealed in its quiet moment of desperation that I was heartless.

While I can now report that I am able to comfortably lounge on my couch and watch television, a skunk family has lost its home and were most likely exterminated (cowardly, I didn’t ask what the trapper did with the creatures).

Having witnessed the price of my comfort, I now think that if another skunk family chooses to take refuge under my home I may just buy a clothespin for my nose.