[Warning;Self harm]
The place stank.
It stank like a dead dog filled with maggots, being baked in the desert noon sun.
It was sickly and sweet, bitter to smell and taste in one's nostrils.
The place was a medium sized storage room, with empty discarded boxes, three wooden crates as furniture , coloured walls and a filthy tiled floor. Four steel shelves were in the room, layed with...things.
These things were what were making the stench.
One shelf held tongues, teeth, lips and gums. Each one had been cut, from different mouths and no two were alike. Worms and decay were sprinkled on them like frosting on a six year olds birthday cake.
The second shelf, held flowers, dry and parched, shoved into pots and tied to small sticks and rods, like the crucified dead.
The third shelf had urine and human bladders in open jars. The yellow liquid stank more than the rotten organs which were meant to contain them, now each cut open like sliced oranges.
The fourth shelf held jewelry, necklaces and bracelets, earrings and rings. They were clattered on the flat steel, and all were coated in dry blood.
Although there were maggots on the shelves where rotten human flesh lay, and a stench that would have brought a swarm, the room had no flies.
Not a single one.
In fact, there wasn't even a spider or roach.
The only living thing in the room, besides the worms, was a man laying on his back in the middle of the room. His hands were spread out and his eyes, a deep green, were glazed over.
He would have been called dead by anyone, if they didn't notice the slight rise and fall of his chest.
The man sighed softly, as he looked left and right, his eyes gazing at what had been his home for nearly three years now.
It wasn't much. But to him, it had meant a lot.
Emphasis on 'had'.
But, for some reason, he'd woken up that morning with a strange feeling.
There were two doors in the room, one leading to an alleyway and the other leading inside an empty, dead store.
The man had never opened the one leading into the store, because zombies often entered the store, and wandered around. He'd hear them, as he huddled in a corner, trying to sleep.
The man sighed softly, as he got up and sat upright, looking around at the room.
Something was wrong.
Very wrong.
Too wrong.
"It's the order." He said to himself.
He often talked to himself. He was a good conversationalist. Atleast, according to himself.
"What should I do?" He asked outloud."What if I switch things up? No? Yes? Okay. Yeah. That's a great idea. Thanks for thinking it up. You always know what to do. Yes, I do."
He mumbled to himself as he got up and started to switch the things in the shelves, starting with the urine jars. He grabbed them and looked around.
"Should we put them with the farm? Or the gifts?" He asked himself, looking at the shelf with human mouth pieces. He called it a farm, because that's what it was.
He was farming flies. Which was the reason there were maggots, but no flies in the foul room. He ate them all, whenever they matured or he felt hungry enough.
He decided to put it in the jewelry shelf, or the 'gift shelf' as he called it. Where he kept gifts, from all the people he met in the near three years he'd been living there. The owners of the gifts had never been alive to give it to him, but he took it off their bodies. Along with their mouths and innards for his farm.
The man moved quickly, moving things around, even the empty boxes he hadn't touched in years. He stacked them, rearranged them and then knocked them over again.
When it was over, he sat down and looked around the room once more.
It still felt wrong.
Why?
"I don't want to stay here anymore."
The man gasped and looked around, as if expecting someone to judge his words.
"What's that mean? What do I mean?" He asked himself and bit his right middle finger anxiously.
"This place is home. This is everything. My everything. Where love...was? I mean is! It is here."
The man fell to his knees, and scratched his face, hard, leaving some shallow cuts on his skin. They were but one of many such self inflicted injuries on his body.
The man started to scratch his shoulder frantically, as he muttered again and again to himself.
"This is home. This is home. This is home. His...home."
The man stopped and looked like he'd come to a most profound realisation.
He got up and looked at his assortment of things and sighed.
"I hate it here. I freaking hate it. Because...I...miss- no! I can't say it. We can't."
The man covered his mouth with one hand and went to a specific cardboard box near the alleyway door. He rummaged inside, until he found a battered and dirty movie ticket.
The man looked at it, then back at the room.
He smiled.
"I'm going to eat that chicken bone...then I'll leave." He said to the empty room, with its stench of rot, filth and grimy thoughts.