Beneath the champagne-tinged ozone that provided Cozumel, Mexico, its only protection against the all-too-near summer sun, Emesía sat at a café table and pondered the meaning of existence.

Having been the victim of too many flatulence-related jokes in her lifetime, having endured the unending antagonism of people who claimed that her inability to pass gas made her something less than human, having been rejected by her (as of today) ex-boyfriend, she was simply tired. And she wondered what exactly life had to offer.

Most people went through life unable to name a reason for existence, unable to claim a particular purpose for their getting up every morning and tramping to work or school other than it’s what’s here, so it’s what I have to do. Emesía was different. But today she was abandoning all her hopes of a better life in order to cleanse herself of that unnamable dirtiness that encompassed her each time she ate at a particularly beany restaurant and was unable to participate in the ages-old pastime of letting one rip.

Seated on her right was Pablo Arconcía, her neighbor who she had enlisted in order to cure her of her plight. Widely acknowledged as producing a bean crop that caused one to expel their entire backlog of flatulent buildup, Pablo was, Emesía believed, her only hope of ever expelling the weight that she had grown accustomed to in her colon.

Emesía was five-four and weighed six hundred pounds, at least sixty percent of which was attributable to her inability to pass gas.

“It’s very simple, Emesía,” said Pablo, in Spanish. “No one has been able to avoid a rip-roaring flatulent display of the crudest kind less than three seconds after eating only one of these beauties.” He help up an ellipsoid legume the size of Emesía’s fingernail. “These are the .25 caliber Arconcía specials. They are considered to be approximately one hundred thirty-six percent gas, despite the claims of many statisticians that this is ‘not mathematically possible’. However, the huge quantity of gas in your colon could pose a danger to any innocent bystanders, including myself, though I am certainly not innocent. For this reason, I’ve built a Self-Contained Flatulence Emitter, the first one ever, for your convenience. It looks just like any ordinary outhouse, down to the little crescent moon on the wooden door. See?” She saw.

“You enter and sit on the toilet, eat the bean, and proceed to emit over four hundred pounds of pure methane. That extremely tall pipe is for the sole purpose of assuring your gas comes out in the stratosphere, where it won’t do any immediate damage to you or your surroundings. You come out a new woman, go back to your ex Marcos...”

He paused. Emesía had thrown an artichoke at him.

“Okay, Marcos is a cheating—yeah, so you won’t go back to Marcos, but you’ll find someone ten times better, and you’ll go back to having that sexy physique that has served you so well in the past.”

Emesía nodded solemnly. “Are you ready?” asked Pablo, once the check had arrived and was paid. She nodded again, and Pablo led her to the cow pasture (cleared of cows) where he had set up the Self-Contained Flatulence Emitter, the product of years of intelligent thought on his part, years of experiments involving exploding cows.

Pablo handed Emesía one of his beans, handling it as though it were a vial containing a deadly poisonous gas that could be released at any moment. The irony of this statement was fully realized by neither of the participants.

The Scofe, the name Pablo had patented his product under (except in Spanish, so it was something different), internally exactly resembled an outhouse, right down to the flies swarming about the toilet seat and the smell of human waste baking in the hot sun drifting through her nostrils. Emesía slowly traversed the few square meters of grass that formed its floor, thoughts bombarding her skull. Why was she doing this? Why was she changing something about herself that she had actually enjoyed just because a jerk boyfriend had dumped her? She was better than this. But then she remembered Marcos’s face at the time he had given that disgusting speech, the look of revulsion that coated his tanned, Spanish skin. She must have done something to deserve this. She was guilty, and now she would throw herself on the mercy of the Scofe.

She removed her clothing and sat down, ignoring the one last shot of disgust at what she was about to do. The bean sat encased in her palm, innocently rolling one way or the other as Emesía shook slightly. Finally, unable to postpone the deed any longer, she popped the legume into her mouth.

Immediately she could tell something was wrong. An enormous wave shuddered through her body, leaving her gasping for breath and tightly clutching the ends of the toilet seat. She felt as though her gallbladder was imploding. She suddenly became very aware that her body was made up mostly of cells and that she was more than sixty percent water. She could feel each individual cell being burst open as thirty-three years of pent-up flatulence began the slow and painful process of diffusing into the stale air. The first fart to escape her large intestine sent the walls of the makeshift Port-a-Potty crashing to the ground. She hurriedly moved to cover her nakedness as Pablo stood watching, mouth agape. The pipes and machinery of the Scofe began to hum – hopefully they were doing their job, thought Emesía in a spurt of consternation. There was a sound like the explosion of an atomic bomb and the second burst blasted into the Scofe, sending a titanic blast of methane gas into the stratosphere. I will not continue to disgust and amaze you with tales of the events that followed; suffice it to say that a hole had been cut through the ozone layer by the time Emesía collapsed, unconscious and over four hundred pounds lighter.

“I – shouldn’t – have – done that,” she whispered to no one in particular, and the prairie wind dispersed the sound into nothingness. She died moments after.

And that enormous shot of methane she delivered into the upper atmosphere? It was the beginning of all this “global warming” we’ve been hearing about lately. Methane is one of the most potent greenhouse gases.

The moral of this story? Don’t change yourself for other people, and don’t see your talents as weaknesses just because others misunderstand them. See the novels of Ayn Rand for further detail.