the scent of ugly death (Short Story)

November 2, 2024

the scent of ugly death1

Then I rushed to my room, the echoes of her voice still lingering in my thoughts. I descended the stairs, only a fraction of my heels touching the edge of each stair, shoved past the counter, opened the door and jumped to my bed. All that while, the walls stared at me in suspicion. For a moment, I didn’t matter – I was nothing, as if nothingness had swallowed me, because I had dissolved into what I had done. As I grew smaller, and smaller, the knife I was holding in my hand grew larger. When it grew so large it could eat me, I held my ears tight and wished the walls would cave in from all directions, and eat me faster.

Sometimes, the world just gets stuck. Pain is private, but sometimes, so is thought. How do you make people understand what you feel, how you feel, and how intensely you feel it? A taste of regret, like a battery on your tongue. A taste of expressionlessness, as if somebody has taken away your senses. A body with no eyes, no ears, no nose, no skin, just a floating Ibn Sinna’s body in space, with nothing but never ending suffocation.

“I have tried”, she said, her eyes full of tears.

“Yes, you have”, he said, patting her head, a poignant reminder of their relationship than anything else.

I didn’t go the next day. Did he like me? He said he wanted to give me all that I had never received.

I had smiled a little bit, more out of not understanding what he meant than anything. Did that give it away? Did he take it as an affirmation?

I was the one who made him like me, I think. I curse myself, sit on my rocking chair, and slowly push it with my leg, as my chair rolls back and forth. The AC is on Cold, and sometimes the cold gives me chills, but I do not have the energy to turn it up.

I know I was subtly giving him hints. I would sometimes leave my purse in his office, only to come back later. He would always smile, his broad chin widening as soon as he would see me return. Maybe he knew back then that I did it on purpose.2 Other times, I would email him about the next meeting and attach my poems along with the email. Immediately, I would send another email, acting extremely apologetic, “sorry, the attachment was a mistake : )”.

“So you write poems too?”, he had asked in the next meeting, his marble-y eyes waiting for my answer, as soon as he had finished asking.

“Sometimes”, I had said, radiant that my plan had worked.

“I didn’t read them though, you told me they were not meant for me”, he had added, as my heart sank into a pit.3

At that point, I was slightly upset, even a little angry at him for not reading my poems. Why does he have to be so uptight about everything, I had snarled in my head. Now that I think about it, could there be a world where he had lied and had read my poems? Did he repeatedly read my poems because he thought I wrote pretty, and that I was as pretty as my poems, and as he read my poems, and understood all of them, he could read me and understand all of me?4

Maybe he likes me too now. The way he was too friendly with me last time, the way he did not have his notes on his lap as he usually did in earlier sessions, the way he looked at me and stared at me a little while longer even when I was done talking – Susan always says we notice those things – when men want us, it’s a sixth sense, isn’t it? I curl up and feel my stomach knot, my rocking chair now stuck somewhere in the middle. I have sinned, I have done a dreadful thing - I have made my therapist fall in love with me.5

The day was brightly lit, it was so yellowish it sucked my entire heart out. Such a day usually gives me the sense of wanting to wither, to decompose into the yellowness – just vanish. I passed the street across from his office, not really planning to go inside. At the last moment, my mind itched so much of what was happening with him, I gave up, sighed for a while at my impatience, and entered his office. The receptionist, Lara, greeted me with an affectionate smile.

“Is he in there?” I asked, acting nonchalant while my heart pounded at my feet.

“Yes, he just came”, she replied, matter-of-fact-edly.

Without replying to her, I just turned around on my back, left the office, and ran for the streets.

One friend of mine once talked to me about how everything boils down to the need for self recognition.6 Is this my need for recognition? All I want is to be the light that draws the moth only to kill it with its brightness – no the moth loves it, loves to die for me. I would kill a hundred moths, then what? Would I be satiated?

The first day she came to the office – the way she carried herself, wasn’t that strange? The way she was so timid, and scared, and uncomfortable in her skin. She didn’t want to be herself, she wanted to be someone else.7 Despair. Heck, I didn’t like myself either. Does anybody?

Lara told me that she had come by to ask for me. A moth is flapping her wings, and wishes to die for me. Maybe it’s going to start hurting someday– this itch to make people see me.

I woke up from the dream. I loosened my hand, and the knife would have fallen down had there actually been a knife. I stretched my legs so that the blanket would cover all of me – I was scared of the seeping cold. My headphones, and my laptop were crawling under my legs, and at that point I did not care if they sprang into action, ate me into pieces and went back to an endless sleep.

I stared into the ceiling for a while, just as the painting on my side was staring at me: a landscape, a bend that has eaten itself, two hills carving the green sky, the depth of sky flowing and hitting the screen of my eyes. The red paint that the painting stood on was eerily familiar – it smelled the scent of ugly death.

The painting scared me so much I got up to my feet, weak and almost failing. Then I rushed to my room, the echoes of her voice still lingering in my thoughts. I descended the stairs, only a fraction of my heels touching the edge of each stair, shoved past the counter, opened the door and jumped to my bed. All that while, the walls stared at me in suspicion. For a moment, I didn’t matter – I was nothing, as if nothingness had swallowed me, because I had dissolved into what I had done. As I grew smaller, and smaller, the knife I was holding in my hand grew larger and larger. When it grew so large it could eat me, I held my ears tight and wished the walls would cave in from all directions, and eat me faster.

Footnotes

Footnotes

  1. I usually do this on caffeine. Not today. Today, I am on paracetamol. Disjointed, weird, on hold. Today, my gums hurt, my head hurts, I zone out once in a while, and while the noise of someone calling consumes me, and I ignore them – all that colorless noise, all that is is a farce; all this is is a farce. I would die, but not today. Today I want to write several paragraphs and make it seem like they form a coherent story. Yet I want my story to be drunk, just a little bit tipsy on anxiety. ↩

  2. Correct! ↩

  3. I had indeed read the poems – over and over actually. You would be surprised at how much I can lie just to see what effects the lie can bring on the other person. ↩

  4. I have never felt fuller than when someone put it words how I exactly felt ↩

  5. “made” is a heavy word, what about you were “made to make”, or “made to make to make” , or “made to make to make to make”, to an infinite regress? ↩

  6. These hegelians! They have brainwashed me, and I cannot help it! ↩

  7. I am a wolf that pounces on the weakest of deers, what does that tell of me? Maybe the reader now knows more about me than I thought I would let them. Maybe it has been a mistake to try jotting all of this, maybe I should stop… ↩