The evening was cloaked in the soft purple glow that always shrouds the night when you are in Minnesota at Christmastime. The weather was cold and dry, and the wispy snow that had been falling for hours floated and danced like silver dust in the northern winds, never seeming to accumulate. Like silent flames, it eddied, snaked, and swirled hypnotically, flowing sideways across the road. In the glow of the car's headlights on the empty highway, the drifting snow was strangely dizzying and mesmerizing, and one had to concentrate on the curb to keep from following the icy wisps into the ditch.

Audrey, my girlfriend of five months, was napping in the passenger's seat. We were leaving the Twin Cities, heading up highway 169 to my parents home on Lake Mille Lacs, ninety minutes north. We had just finished a late dinner with some old college friends at the Red Dragon, a Chinese restaurant in uptown Minneapolis.

The first forty-five minutes were slow-going. It was 11:45 PM on the Thursday before Christmas and the highway was mostly empty north of the beltway. We were in no-man's land, and the few businesses and small towns that we passed through were closed for the night. The sidewinding eddies of snow snaking across the road were increasingly distracting, and with no streetlights or cars in front of me to track by, the going was nerve-wracking. FM reception had phased out fifteen miles before, and AM talk radio was not up to the task of keeping me awake and alert in the advancing blizzard conditions. The hot, dry heat roaring from the vents wasn't helping either; and we still had almost an hour to go.

Audrey dozed in the passengers seat, her breath slow and steady. Every few minutes, her head would loll forward and she would jerk it up with a snort, stare blankly ahead for a moment, and then slip back into unconsciousness. This went on for twenty minutes: head slowly slips to the side, head falls forward, snort, head jerks up, head slowly slips to the side. Beginning on the snorts, I counted nine cycles; and I was trying to guesstimate the duration of the tenth when a high-pitched burbling squeal emanated from Audrey's lower stomach and spiraled down into a saucy, rumbling internal groan which seemed to fizzle out and go silent for a moment; then a muffled pop, and then it squiggled sharply up again, as if asking a question. It was as if an enormous fart had been thwarted just as it was about to make its escape and was forced to suck itself back up into the dark recesses of the bowels from whence it came, burbling fitfully.

Audrey's head snapped up as her eyes popped open. She stared directly ahead, shifting slightly in her seat. She didn't look at me, and she never said a word.

We were not yet at that stage in our relationship where either of us felt comfortable farting in front of the other, and I didn't want to embarrass her, although her reaction was priceless. I didn't know if she had heard herself or not, but the change in the position of her legs and the way her back stiffened-up indicated to me that she had definitely felt something. Something... unnerving.

It was snowing harder now, and the poor visibility had slowed our trek to a white-knuckled crawl. The occasional eighteen-wheeler would roar past us, sending plumes of snow billowing around and obliterating the road ahead in a chaotic white whirlwind. The beams from the headlights faded into the swirling, ashen haze, and the blowing snow gave one the dizzying sensation that the car was turning constantly to the right. "It's really coming down hard," said Audrey flatly, still sitting awkwardly, staring directly ahead.

"Yup," I replied, watching her from the corner of my eye. A few moments passed, and she still hadn't moved.

"So, how long ‘til we get there?" she asked, nonchalantly.

"About an hour," I responded. "I can only drive forty or so in this stuff."

"Mmm-hmm," she said, as if considering her options. I began to notice the biting, acrid scent of honest-to-god shit, and a childhood memory wafted over me in a pungent cloud: when I was twelve years old, Uncle Olaf would take me and my cousins grouse-hunting in the poplar woods surrounding my grandfather's farm. If one of us had to poop, he would make us all stop as he sent the pooper back a few yards the way we came with his hunting knife and a fistful of leaves, telling the pooper to dig a small hole with the knife and bury the leavings. My youngest cousin, Erik, had "shy bowels", and would hold it all day, stopping and squatting for a few moments now and then, clenching his cheeks tightly and waiting for the urge to pass. On one such occasion, Erik apparently decided to try to relieve some of the relentless pressure in his intestines by farting¬, accidentally shitting his pants in the process. He got really quiet, and then started crying. The hunt was officially over for the day, and when we returned to the house, Uncle Olaf explained loudly to everyone that Eric had "gambled and lost" and had "sharted" himself in the woods. It was we kids' favorite word for the rest of the autumn.

I returned from my brief meditation, unsure of what to do next. The sound that I had thought was my girlfriend's thwarted fart was, I suspected, a shart -- a malevolent fart that had escaped only by pushing out a portion of fecal matter that had been hiding, undetected, near the sphincter. She must have noticed the smell as well, as she quickly opened the glove compartment and fumbled around for the ancient pack of cigarettes I kept around as an occasional smoker.

"You want one?" she asked hurriedly, pressing the car lighter in and cracking her window before she even had a cigarette out of the pack.

"Yeah, this road's making me a little squirrelly," I replied, realizing what she was doing. I cranked the heat up full blast and cracked my window as Audrey lit both cigarettes and handed one to me. We smoked in silence, my attempts at conversation deflected with a litany of "Hmm's" and "uh-huh's." After a few minutes, the heater could no longer hold its own in its battle between two open windows, and we rolled them up.

I was slowly pulled from my brief reprieve by the odor of crap gradually emanating from the passenger seat. Audrey looked directly at me for the first time since the suspected shart, and said meekly, "I hope we get there soon, I don't feel so good."

I feigned surprise. "Do you want me to pull over somewhere?"

Audrey peered out into the swirling wasteland. "Are we close to anything?" she asked suspiciously.

"There's a rest stop somewhere up this way," I replied. "I don't remember exactly where it is, but I don't think we passed it yet."

Audrey sighed in relief. "Perfect."

Sure enough, a few miles later, a blue sign heralded the rest stop just ahead. We pulled up through the winding service road, through the silent lot, and parked next to the door.

As soon as we stopped, Audrey bolted from the car, clutching one of her bags, scooting her feet quickly through the snow, through the double doors, disappearing into the ladies room.

As soon as she was out of sight, I took the opportunity to open my door to air the car out a bit. As I did, the dome light came on and illuminated the front seat. There, smeared sideways across the back of the vinyl passenger's seat, was a dark, brown, oily stain where Audrey's lower back would have been.

We had been dating only a few months, and there was still plenty of giddy mystery in the relationship. It was far too soon to let a hot smear of partially-digested scallops and hot and sour soup ruin the honeymoon. I knew what I had to do. I deftly reached into the back seat, yanked a small blanket off the floor, and got to work.

I was able to scoop up most of the shit in one corner of the blanket, as there wasn't much of it. Then I folded the corner over several times and used the rest of the blanket to wipe down most of the vinyl seat. While the shit was sticky, it was not particularly runny, so it hadn't run down into the creases of the seat. It was sort of greasy, however, preferring to smear around rather than get nicely sopped-up. I needed some type of solvent.

I searched the glovebox. Finding only a small bottle of Armor-All, I squirted it liberally onto the vinyl of the passenger seat. I kept up the process of wiping and folding, wiping and folding, until the stain was gone and the blanket was ruined.

I gave the seat one last spritz of Armor-All, polishing it with the last clean corner of the blanket, spritzed a few blasts of the stuff into the air, and lit another cigarette for good measure. I took the wadded-up blanket, reached down and stuffed it under my side of the car in the snow, closed the door, and waited for Audrey to return, most likely wearing different pants and smelling like too much perfume.

Ten minutes passed. Audrey came trudging back to the car with her bag and two cans of grape pop from the machine inside. She was wearing different pants, as I had foretold. Sweatpants, this time. She climbed into the car and sat down without looking at me, babbling something about "getting comfy". She immediately slid forward in the newly-polished seat, slipping back and forth crazily. I smiled, but didn't say a word. I hoped that she would just assume that the slippage was due to her fuzzy sweatpants, although I couldn't imagine how she couldn't have guessed that some of her shit had spurted up the back of her pants and onto the seat, since she must have seen the mess on her own clothes when she was changing.

We pulled out of the rest stop and continued our journey headlong into the frosty void. We sipped our sodas and discussed childhood Christmases and the upcoming holiday weekend, both of us privately trying to put the past ten miles behind us. Audrey never did admit to sharting herself that blustery night, and I never brought it up, though I never did see those dark-blue corduroy pants of hers again. The event had passed, unacknowledged by all, with only a tattered, shit-stained blanket laying at a deserted rest stop to tell the tale.