"The Smell" by Leon Wing

The Smell

By Leon Wing

She didn’t flush after evacuating, or even wipe herself .  She went to the bureau  in the adjoining room of the apartment, to rifle through the drawers for any clean clothes to put on. She sniffed at her pong, but she thought the smell coming from the kitchen was even worse.

     She had been getting familiar with all the rooms in this apartment for a week now, sleeping in one, then the other. Like Goldilocks and the three bears, she finally found the softest, most comfortable, bed.

     She wasn’t going back to bed, now that she was up, even if the sun wasn’t.  Outside was humid, and dusty ten floors down, in the KL streets. Up here, she made to go into the kitchen, but the smell caused her to gag.

     She had to go in, anyway.  How else was she going to get to the fridge, for something to eat, having finished off any edible stuff around this place?  The last real meal was before there was that smell, when she used the knife, when it was still clean.

     Now, it was dirty.  It was congealed with blood.  She pulled the knife out of the rotting body on the kitchen floor.  She wiped the blood off the blade on her clothes, and sliced some bread up for sandwiches.

© Leon Wing 2008

Creative process: Leon Wing:  I wrote this while facebooking with someone.  When our conversation finished so did this short story.  I was not composing it in my usual manner, which is long complex syntax, as with my other pieces.  This time I wanted to get the story down fast without thinking too much about style, grammar, sentence structure; all those linguistics gimmicks (pun!).   I dashed this off in the fashion of flash fiction – or whatever people now term these types of writing – short shorts, micro fiction, flash fiction, 1-minute, 20-minute (from McSweeney’s).

Leon Wing writes poems, mostly. He “sees” shapes, colours, objects, structures, when reading them; like some people do when listening to sounds or music. However, he does write  fiction, at times, like this time.