Disclaimer: horribly gory you may find it but original flash fiction.

The smells, it’s always the smells.

Infinite yet infinitesimally small, tiny, fragmented, dissected, deciphered, desirous dereliction.

Smells of humans, each human smells different.

It is smells of humans which when match we marry, befriend and love.

Smells of dogs- my pet dog and the street cur.

Smells of newborn kittens, humans, lions, kangaroos and tortoises.

Smells of new rain, hitting the parched lands, melting in grass, dew drops.

Then there was the smell of my house, my freshly painted bars.

Can we not know if a human is an offender through his smells.

The answer is no, we cannot, precisely since the world is never taught to know the smell of trust, anger, contempt, constricted connivance.

Had we learnt it, the world would be much simpler and humans more alert of what they desire and what they think, like when I met the child before she was swept away in the floods right through the hill cliff, flowing with water like dirt, dumped on the pool beneath the fall mashed up, fed upon by the hoax hyenas.

Like the day I met the man on the street who followed me to the store, sniffing me all the way trying to abduct me, a lair of booby traps lying in the ends and I was all by myself to use the means, to walk the means.

I had then not had to fight the battle in my mind to win it on him- my mind was my only friend to guide me through, make a curve of your right hand, hold the man’s head, punch his nose using your right elbow, poke his nose with the pen dangling from a wire at the end of the stalk, heel his balls till he shrieks like a monster in pain, pull him over the left shoulder, drop him on the ground but do not thud him down, pulsate his neck and prick the pin into the point- the kiss of death.

Slowly pulling over, resting the back against the shelf as sweat beads travel down the bridge of my nose, dripping from a molehill of a mountain.

The body twisted, turned, tossed, constricted, contrived, eye balls bulged out, the final bow formed.

“It’s tetanus. A man is dying from tetanus. Help.”

The boy screamed as he ran to the counter, soon more men came, gathered around him.

My eyes followed his mouth which clenched and locked, the jaws were no longer moving. But I waited for what came slowly, the white foam with a tinge of red like a streak of vermillion. The man would live but tied to bed for long.

Alas! Had all been taught to sniff like the man.

Whispers, clippers, no one knew the man would have torn me to shards, biting out every bit of flesh sticking to the bones. Like the sharks, his teeth would tear me into a meal.

He tore my cousin as I hid in fear.

I cowered then as she recovered and escaped to the Iceland.

She lives happily in Philadelphia with a man she loves and a child.

I am not her.

I do not run.

I do not feign, the world is beautiful

Since this world cannot be sans the thorns.

No one knew even then, no one knows even now.

The merest kiss of Holy, scrumptious death.