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Description
The house always smelled like a marketplace from the third-world homeland of my parents. The stench of squid, fermented and dried far too long in the sun, always seemed to linger. My Auntie's favorite, we always had a ready to cook supply of the reddish-purple treat hidden in plastic containers once full of Skyflakes Crackers, imported straight from the Philippines. Auntie Nita would fry up a batch whenever she felt especially homesick. "Ay, nako," she would say. "Can you open the windows so that the e-smell will go out?" Then I would close the doors to all the bedrooms and open all the windows, hoping that for once the sickly sour stench wouldn't creep into my room and on to my bed sheets or the clothes in my drawers, and instead leave the house for good. But while the fierce trade winds could force the branches off the tree in our yard, they could never blow the smell away, and no amount of incense could hide the pungent stench of dried squid.

Description
The house always smelled like a marketplace from the third-world homeland of my parents. The stench of squid, fermented and dried far too long in the sun, always seemed to linger. My Auntie's favorite, we always had a ready to cook supply of the reddish-purple treat hidden in plastic containers once full of Skyflakes Crackers, imported straight from the Philippines. Auntie Nita would fry up a batch whenever she felt especially homesick. "Ay, nako," she would say. "Can you open the windows so that the e-smell will go out?" Then I would close the doors to all the bedrooms and open all the windows, hoping that for once the sickly sour stench wouldn't creep into my room and on to my bed sheets or the clothes in my drawers, and instead leave the house for good. But while the fierce trade winds could force the branches off the tree in our yard, they could never blow the smell away, and no amount of incense could hide the pungent stench of dried squid.