Originally published in Nosebleed Magazine
The fowl, musty, stinking aroma of age crept like a shadow around my rotting apartment, disguised only by my efforts to mask it with weed and candles. The walls seemed to drip with this smell, pulling down the paint my landlord slopped on everything after every tenant. Layers and layers of the white stuff. Every creaking door hinge, every cracked windowsill, until they couldn’t even be opened anymore. At least it kept the heat in. The snow outside fell in blankets.
Hunched over on my bed, I lit up, the rose end of my joint was friends with the heady, warm Christmas lights I had stuck about the room. Smoke swelled in my lungs and I held onto it like a long embrace. It clouded around my head and stuck on the ceiling. Sweet and sick.
Thump, thump, th-thump, thump. My landlord.
I swung open the door and looked up at my landlord standing tall in front of me. He was business-like, middle-aged, collared shirt, jaw square, blond hair cropped close.
“Hey.”
“Rent’s due.”
“I know.” He knew I knew.
“Do you have it?”
“I texted you.”
He scuffed his leather shoes against the thin hallway carpet. “Yeah.”
“Do you want to come in?”
“Yeah.”
He came in.
Whenever my landlord came to talk about the rent, he left his stench with me. It wasn’t exactly the kind of smell you roll over and bury your face in the pillowcase for. It was just another layer added to the room. Musky and bougie. Cologne covered. My eyelids grew heavy as I laid there in my bed, so I swaddled myself and slept.
In the middle of the night, I woke up, my stomach lurching. I tossed away my covers and ran to the bathroom. I spat my guts into the toilet. I crawled back to my bed.
I woke up and there was a smell. New smell. Bad smell. I ignored it and fell into sleep again.
I woke up and the smell fucked me. It reached all the way into my throat and grabbed my lungs in huge fistfulls. I heaved and puked all over my lap. Gasping, I threw the sopping quilt off of me, then limped to the bathroom and chucked it into the tub.
The perimeter of my apartment was ravaged as I tried to locate the source of the smell. I even turned the big light on. There was nothing. Well, there was the quilt in the bathroom, and an old cereal bowl and a pile of dirty laundry that hadn’t been touched in a month, but the smell was so much worse. The smell was metal. The smell was meat. The smell was agony. It was shit and piss. It clouded around my head and stuck on the ceiling. I stopped. I looked up.
It was on my ceiling.
It was brown and black and glistening pink.
It was liquid and solid. It was hairy. It was twitching.
It was falling.
I woke up on the ground. I couldn’t move. I could only gag on my own breaths. The smell was even stronger, it was penetrating, it was drowning. It was coming from inside of me.
Hungry, came a whisper, as quiet as a feather falls.
My stomach dropped.
Move, it said, from inside. Move now.
My finger twitched. Sweat beaded across my face. Every part of me stiffened and weakened. The very bones in my body felt thinner. My hand began to tremble and slowly, slowly lifted itself from the floor. All I could do was watch from the corner of my eye.
Move now. Hungry. Move. Hungry. Please.
With shaking limbs, my body tried to stand itself upright, but my wobbly knees couldn’t hold my own weight. My body collapsed and hit the ground hard. It screamed.
NO! Please! Please! Please! Sorry! Hungry! No!
The room spun as its anguished cries pounded against my head. That big light was so fucking bright. A kaleidoscope of lights and colors swirled around my vision as its wailing voice begged me to move. I felt a wetness on my cheek. I was crying. I was breathing.
Thump, thump, th-thump, thump. Oh no.
My landlord let himself in, shuffling inside. His wide eyes scanned my pale, stiff body. The tip of his leather shoe took a timid step towards me.
Hungry, it whimpered.
It moved me.
It angled my head down at the emptied husk of my landlord. I couldn’t even close my eyes. It made me do it. It made me feed it.
More, it said. Make more. Please.
A hard, sharp chunk rose in my throat, black bile spilling down my chin. I felt its rage swell as I strained and swallowed.
Make. More. Please.
It tightened its grip. I was trapped. I wanted to scream but my vocal chords sat taught and useless in my throat. I needed to move. The steady pumping of my lungs was all I could focus on. I counted three breaths before I pictured all the strength in my body and jerked for the open door. I didn’t make it far. Furious, it threw me against the wall and down onto the thin carpet, adding a red smear to the layers of white. Its anger throbbed. It started to pull me back towards the mess it made of my landlord. Oh no. No, I knew what it was doing and I felt fear twist in my chest. I scrambled with the last bit of my control, crawling against the current of my blood, my stiff finger tips tearing jagged strips of carpet and wood as I pulled and it pulled. But it was a pointless struggle. It had filled me completely. It was liquid in my blood. It was my organs. It was my air. It whispered my thoughts back to me.
More, it said.
The cold night before me was dark and endless as my body wandered, full, into the fields of white snow just beyond my emptied apartment.