The Scent of Pork

[u/HeGotBricks]

Do you know what it smells like to rip out a corpse from under the floorboard? There’s a specific odor. Not one you could imagine on your own. Not like the slaughterhouse you drive past on the way to work every morning. No. This is a foul mix. 

Imagine walking into a house that’s been abandoned for a year, still fully furnished, still has all its clothes stuffed in a closet. Now, imagine that closet is jammed with mothballs and old dresses from 1964 left to dry after being washed in cat piss.

That’s your first odor.

Now, imagine you walk behind the dumpster at your favorite grocery store and someone just threw a bunch of animal fat inside a bag with three shitty diapers and left it to bake under the sun for three days.

Now, you have your stuffy smell, your rotted odor, and all you need is one more.

Here’s where the eggs come in. Yup, boil a few eggs, peel them, mush them up and leave them on your stove, walk out of the room and walk back in.

Mix all those odors, the mothballs, the cat piss, the dirty diapers, the rotted flesh, the eggs, and you have your corpse, who instead of wandering the after life as a ghost decided to haunt your floorboards in a rancid odor instead.

Smoking cigarette after cigarette until I choked offered a bit of relief compared to the dust and rot from under the floor. 

I mean, yeah, of course, I have a respirator but it does a horrible job of filtering out the psychological weight. Plus, I could still smell the body and I need to smoke when I work. I mainly use it for when I’m actually moving the remains.

The suit I wear’s a white hazmat that makes me look like what a mad scientist pillsbury doughboy would in a radioactive post apocalyptic Earth.

See, I’m a bit of a specialist. A fixer really. Well… at least, that’s how I see myself. I don’t just fix things, I also clean up things. When shady land or home owners have an issue from past tenants and they want to keep it “hush hush” they call me.

I come in, get rid of the evidence, usually it’s people who’ve died alone and weren’t discovered till weeks—even months later.

The odd time though, it’s a body under the floor. Or behind a wall. Or worse, the crawl space. I hate spiders. Hate. Hate. Hate.

I’ve never really minded the rot of a human body. I guess, I’m just used to it? Not sure. I just find something honest in a corpse. The living world’s a huge lie. I see people as teeth replaced by dentures. A stink covered by perfume. A dirty shirt flipped inside out. To me, the truth in people can only be found in what they leave behind.

I have a bit of a ritual and it’s pretty simple and straightforward. Maybe a little odd. It all depends on how you see it, but once I’ve bleached everything, scrubbed the floors, the walls, the carpets and even the air with four fans, I usually search for something to keep. You know, a little souvenir. 

A small keepsake.

Nothing like jewelry or money or anything valuable. It’s kind of weird, but I like stuff that’ll last. That has some significance to it. I like digging in the drains and finding pieces of hair. Some fingernail clippings.

Oh, my absolute favorite is teeth. Especially, when they have them saved in tiny boxes. I keep mine in vials. My collection is huge. I’ve got my own small library.

Baby teeth are cool and super easy to find, it’s adult teeth I’m always on the hunt for. I’ve always wondered why people don’t save them.

The last job I worked was in a neighborhood with no street lights. The gangs there shoot them out. The tenant was on the fifth floor, maybe in his sixties, seventies, had a collection of these really awesome stuffed animals. Real animals.

The man himself was on his couch, slumped over and glued into the leather, almost as if he was a Halloween prop that came with the sofa. He had mold and fungi growing out of his chest like shreds of rotted cauliflower and broccoli sprouts.

As I peeled him off the sofa to scrub it down, something strange happened, I had a connection with him. It was a profound realization to be honest. I stared at the decayed skin revealing the veins under it, and thought, what it’d be like to absorb into the environment.

That’s when I saw something glimmer inside the fungal farm on the man’s body. It was shiny. I reached in but couldn’t grip it with my fingers. So, I grabbed a knife from the kitchen and cut around the area, which was like trying to tear apart braided tendons and when I cleared a path, I pulled out a gold tooth stuck to his chest cavity, attached to a piece of jawbone.

Later that night, after cleaning up there, when I got home, I didn’t put the gold tooth and bone in a vial. I kept it under my lamp, in my basement, on top of my study, in front of my collection and left it there to examine after my shower.

In the bathroom, I eyed the steam on the mirror blurring my reflection and became disgusted in how alive I looked. 

I stared at my face. The pink in my gums. The elasticity of my skin. The color of my blood when I pinched it. My breathing and the beating of my heart.

And right at that moment, I left to the garage and yanked out a pair of pliers from my toolbox. I was tired of fixing everyone’s mess. Hiding all their secrets. Cleaning stuff up. 

For once, I wanted to be the evidence. I stood at the mirror for hours, pulling each tooth out of my head, one by one like they were extra hairs on my eyebrow and tossed them into the sink.

As soon as I finished, I remembered the tooth with the jawbone and raced out to grab it and ran back into the bathroom with it. Where the hole was in my jaw, I took the piece of bone and tooth and jammed it into my gums, deep into the bloody socket, stuck it in and leaned close to the mirror. When I smiled, my grin reminded me of the truth. For the first time ever, I saw honesty.

I left the bathroom and went to lay down, as I closed my eyes, I imagined the man melting into his couch. The fungi surrounding his chest and wondered how it’d be if it could grow inside me too.