The Stink

The Stink, it was the stench that drove me to madness.
A sour, decaying odor, thick and unrelenting, seeped through the warped boards and blistered paint of my apartment walls, crawling in through the cracks around the window that faced the alley—a desolate vein of filth and silence. The stench wafted upward like a curse, carried on the breath of rot and forgotten things. It clung to the air inside like a second skin, fouling my clothes, soaking into the peeling wallpaper, burrowing into the marrow of my bones. Every evening, just as the last dull light slipped behind the skeletal remains of crumbling tenements, the smell would arrive. And with it, him.
I came to call him The Stink.
I never bothered to learn his name, but I knew him all too well. His presence was a blight, a vile stain that poisoned the air, festering like an open wound in the otherwise peaceful streets. Every night, just after dusk, that wretched figure would stagger through the narrow alleyway outside my home, dragging his sorry, bloated body from shadow to shadow. His breath—oh, that breath—reeked of rancid beer, sour like spoiled milk, mingled with the nauseating stench of sweat caked into his skin. His clothes? Tattered rags, soaked through with the stench of his decay, a grotesque tapestry of filth, grime, and the rotten essence of countless drunken nights. But it was the smell—the smell—that turned my stomach, that made bile rise in my throat. It wasn’t just sweat or beer. No, this stench was a festering rot, as if death itself had settled into his bones, slowly consuming him from the inside out. Every time that rancid wave of odor hit my senses, I wanted to gag, to claw my own flesh off just to rid myself of it. That putrid reek—God, it was as if his very existence was a rotting carcass, a slow, suffocating decay that clung to every fiber of my being.
I could not bear it. For weeks, I sat by my window, watching as his filthy silhouette lurched closer, the clinking of glass bottles ringing out like some sickening symphony composed in hell. His boots scraped against the uneven cobblestones, dragging through the muck like the desperate, dragging steps of a corpse—not quite dead, but certainly not alive. The way he moved—slow, jerking, grotesque—the way he laughed, those guttural, slurred sounds, tore at something deep within me, twisting my insides into knots.
At first, it was a nuisance, an irritating blemish on the evening that I could dismiss. But it grew. Oh, how it grew! That stench wormed its way into my mind, burrowing deep into the cracks of my thoughts like a festering disease. Each night, as the sun sank lower and the shadows stretched long, my stomach would knot in bitter anticipation. My muscles would tense with disgust, knowing what was coming—that smell, that sound, that loathsome sight. It was a torment beyond reason.
Why did no one else see it? How could they walk past him—it—without gagging, without reeling, without screaming? Were they blind to the rot stitched into his skin? Deaf to the dry, phlegmy howls that ricocheted down the alleyways like the laughter of something unholy? Every night, the stink came creeping—low and wet—sliding beneath my door like spoiled grease, curling into my sheets, soaking into the walls. I breathed it. I ingested it. I could taste him on my tongue when I woke—copper, ammonia, old meat. It wasn’t metaphor anymore. It was inside me.
And still they smiled. They scrolled. They walked their dogs and kissed their children and ignored the infestation lurking in plain sight. I watched him lurch past, a walking landfill stuffed into a coat, and I knew. This was no man. This was a wound made flesh.
He had to be stopped.
I couldn’t take another night. Not one more hour of that oozing presence pressing against the edges of my reality. He left stains that never dried. He shed—skin, stink, sounds I can’t describe, bits of things I swear moved when the light hit them wrong. I told myself it wasn’t real. I tried. But he clung to me, like a disease with breath and weight. And I could feel something in me curling inward, something being hollowed out.
No man should have to live like that.
No man could.
He was a plague—worse than a plague, because a plague doesn’t look at you. A plague doesn’t smile. A plague doesn’t whisper your name when you're alone in your room, pretending to sleep with your fists clenched tight around your sanity.
He had to be eradicated.
Before he consumed me.
Before I realized that he already had.
I could feel it before I even heard him. That familiar, gut-churning anticipation, the sickening tightening in my chest, the way my throat would clench as the first whiff of it crept into my senses. The stench was coming. I could almost taste it, sharp and vile, lingering at the back of my tongue like an acid burn. It wasn't just a smell anymore—it was a presence, an entity, crawling and slithering through the air, worming its way into the cracks of my mind. My body recoiled instinctively, like a dog pulling away from a carcass too foul to approach, but I couldn’t escape. The stink had a hold of me. And it was closing in, slowly, suffocatingly.
It wasn’t just a smell anymore. No—calling it a smell would be a mercy. It was a disease. A living, festering miasma that clawed its way into my nostrils and laid eggs in the folds of my brain. The air itself had curdled around me, thick and wet like rotting meat left to bake in the sun. I breathed it, choked on it, lived inside it. It pressed down on my chest like a corpse sprawled across my ribs. Every time he passed—every disgusting, oozing shuffle of his rancid existence—another wave of that sickening stench invaded me. It was like inhaling moldy death.
But I’m not crazy.
It’s real. It’s real. He reeks—not just of garbage or filth, but of something older, something wrong. And yet no one else flinches. No one gags. They walk past him like he isn’t leaking that... aura—like the world isn’t warping around him. They don’t see how the plants by the sidewalk shrivel after he walks by. They don’t hear the wet squelch in his steps or the flies humming in his wake.
But I do. I can’t not. And I hate him for it.
I sit at my window, clenching my jaw until my teeth ache, watching him lurch down the street with that obscene, twitching gait, a parody of a man. My hands tremble—my nails carving crescents into my palms as he cackles, a laugh that bubbles up like sewage through a clogged drain. That sound. That smell. It isn’t just offensive—it’s assault.
He doesn’t deserve to exist, he’s a walking bile factory, a stain on the earth, a putrid blight in human skin. I swear to you—I’m not mad. I’m aware. And awareness is agony.
I had to end it. Had to. You would’ve done the same.

He is the foulest, filthiest, worm-riddled, sewer-dwelling, maggot-bloated stink that ever squelched out of the dark—and I swear, I swear, I’m the only one who sees it.
Please tell me—you can smell it too… right?
Because I knew. I knew where he would be. I’d studied him, mapped his grotesque little rituals like some bloated priest of rot. Every evening, like clockwork, he paraded his reeking carcass through the alley behind my building—a lumbering monument to everything foul. I’d memorized the rhythm of his decay, the schedule of his stink.
So I waited.
God help me, I waited—crouched behind cracked blinds, fingers twitching, breath shallow, the wallpaper around me wilting under the weight of anticipation. The air was already thick with it, thick with him—that pre-rot scent, like meat sweating in plastic wrap, or milk gone sour somewhere unseen. It clawed at my throat, curled up inside my stomach like a parasite gnawing from within. And still, I waited.
Then, there—there he was.
A shifting lump of shadow against the bruise-colored sky, lurching through the alley like a bag of offal in a windstorm. The sound came first—glass rattling against glass, the clink of bottles soaked in filth, each one probably filled with the reeking remains of whatever crawled out of his soul. And then the smell. Oh god, the smell rolled in like a living thing, thick and oily, slithering down the alley ahead of him like a herald of pestilence.
It wasn’t just foul. It was personal. It knew me. And it wanted inside.
Don’t you dare tell me it’s not real. Don’t you dare say it’s in my head.
Because I saw him, I smelled him—and I knew, with absolute certainty, that this was no man.
This was a curse, and I was the only one who noticed.
I’m not insane. I know how it sounds—but I know what I smelled. It wasn’t just him. It was it. That stench. That thing that clung to him like a second skin, thick and oily, crawling up my nostrils and nesting behind my eyes. It lived on him. It whispered. It laughed.
I didn’t even think. I just acted.
I slammed the door open so hard it cracked against the wall, and I stormed out into the alley, teeth bared like an animal. My hands trembled, not with fear—never fear—but revulsion. Fury. A loathing so complete it felt holy. He was out there, swaying on his feet, a grotesque caricature of a man with that rotten grin splitting his face wide open. He didn’t even flinch.
The stink reached me first. Sweet, bloated, wet. Like meat left out too long in the sun. Like breath from a sewer grate. It coated the back of my throat and turned my stomach to acid. My vision blurred, but I kept walking.
I didn’t say a word. What was there to say? He wasn’t a man anymore. He was a host.
I lunged. My hands closed around his throat and even through my gloves, I could feel it—the slime, the heat, the pulsing rot of him. He made a choking sound, gurgled something stupid. His eyes went wide, pleading, confused. Good. Let him not understand. Let the stink know.
I squeezed until my knuckles cracked. His feet kicked at the garbage-stained ground, slipping in something that might’ve been blood or beer or both. The alley reeked.
The stink didn’t vanish. It lingered.
The bastard had died, but his stench? His stench remained.
I stumbled back, eyes wide, chest splitting open with each heaving breath. I couldn’t stop it. The stink. It owned the air, crawling into my nose, my mouth—slick and meaty, like rot smeared under the tongue. It was in my hair, soaked into my skin like oil, pressing wet fingerprints into the fabric of my clothes. I could feel it breeding inside my lungs.
That smell. That bloated, rancid, human smell. It wasn’t just in the bleak alley. It was inside me.
I am not insane. Don’t look at me like that. You weren’t there. You didn’t smell it. You didn’t breathe it in—every hour, every minute, thick and oily, like the breath of something ancient and rotting just beneath the floorboards. It wasn’t just a stench—it was an infection. A disease made airborne. He didn’t just stink. He oozed. He leaked decay like a ruptured carcass left in the sun, bloating and splitting with every step he took. His sweat was meat juice. His breath? Moldy milk and burnt hair.
I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t think. That stench seeped into the walls, into my clothes, into my skin. I washed until I bled. Still, it clung. I smelled him inside me. I had to do something—I had to excise it. You think gutting him was murder? No. It was a cleansing. A holy, desperate purge. I split him open like a bloated fruit, praying that the stink would spill out and be gone.
But it didn’t. It only got worse. The air turned syrupy with rot, thick enough to choke on. It buzzed with invisible flies, burrowed into my sinuses and nested in my lungs. The smell became alive, became aware. I feel it watching me from behind my own eyes. I taste it in my teeth. It feeds on me now, squirming in my joints, squatting in my gut like a toad made of gas and pus and memory.
You think I’m mad? No. No. Madness would be a mercy. This is clarity. I finally see what’s underneath everything—what festers just beneath the skin of the world. And it stinks.
I’m telling you—I didn’t want this.
I didn’t invite it. I cleansed. I burned. I screamed the names in the right order, lit the herbs, spilled the salt. I followed every rite, every rule—but it came anyway. Or maybe it was always there. Maybe I scraped too deep and found myself staring back—wriggling.
There’s no undoing it now. No priest. No bleach. No scalpel sharp enough to carve it out.
But I am not insane.
Do you hear me? This is not madness. This is clarity.
Because now, I understand.
Every night I watched the alley, swearing he passed by, swearing he laughed at me. But those weren’t his steps scraping the cobblestones.
They were mine.
The glass bottles clinking?
Mine.
The filthy breath, thick with spoiled drink and sour regret?
Mine.
I killed no one. There was no one to kill.
I strangled a shadow. I tore open the memory of who I used to be, screaming at it to give me peace.
But the stink remained because I remained. A walking carcass dressed in flesh, sour to the soul. The world didn’t ignore him. It ignored me. Because I was already gone.
The last thing to rot was my mind.
Now I sit, every evening, in that same cracked window, watching that same alley, waiting for something that will never come—because it already has.
I am The Stink.
And I always was.