Maricopa keeps inching east, and with it the morning rituals: gas for the car, caffeine for the spirit. On the corner of Honeycutt and Porter Roads sits one of Arizona’s busiest Circle K stores, which collects these habits the way Senita’s open fields are still collecting water runoff. 

The place possesses a singularity that regulars speak of without being asked. Step inside and the air presents itself first. 

“It smells like someone threw up,” Tim King said on the sidewalk this morning, barely prompted to describe the smell. “We talk about it all the time. It’s so bad.”  

King is not alone in the diagnosis. The odor has become a kind of public record. Google reviewers, while passionate about the soda and slurpie deals, have a hard time getting past the stench. 

Here is how they describe it in their reviews:  

“Vomit and spoiled milk,” offered Andrew Harrison.

Another described it as the overwhelming stench of “hot garbage and vomit.” 

“Dirty, smelly beverage area.” 

“Rancid mop water,” logged Morgan Montemorra.  

The descriptions themselves are overwhelming.  

“Straight sewage.”  

“Sour.”  

“STANK like crazy.”  

“A puke bucket,” said James Briscoe.  

The reviews go back years. On InMaricopa social media pages, countless comments identify and attempt to describe the odor. Several readers asked us for an investigative story explaining the reek.

On this day, though, something shifts. An eagle eyed InMaricopa fan alerted us to the possible beginning of the stench’s end. The floors were being cut open where the slushie machine lives. Crates are stacked to form a pillars, a barricade around the potential culprit. 

The clerk rings up a soda while the question is asked: Are you guys fixing whatever smells? 

“Yeah, a pipe under the slushie machine,” the clerk offers. “They’re finally fixing it.” 

For a moment the air seems lighter, like someone opened a window after it’s been closed for too long. Maybe we won’t have to wade through this mystery odor for a Pepsi.  

Despite the fix, is the smell still there? InMaricopa‘s editor, a regular customer, barely detected the smell when he stopped at 9 a.m. (a stark departure from last night’s expected effluvia). But not everyone agreed.

“Oh, I still smell it,” said customer Dan Triolo as exited the shop in a hurry on his lunch break this afternoon. “I’d love if it wasn’t like that.”   

If the pipe is indeed the culprit, the saga will die quietly beneath this patch of new tile, along with the stench. And the store will return to its ordinary fuel, ice and soda dispensing ways.

Let the healing process begin.