Rotten Earth

There was a damp, rotten smell in the air. It was something he had experienced before and will experience again, but he didn't know where.

Or when.

Or what.

It assaulted his nose, making him desperate to get out of the garden. He looked around wildly, hoping to spot the perpetrator of the smell: a dead animal, moldy plants. something, anything, to make sense of this overwhelming sense of wrong.

But he couldn't. So, he went to sleep. He didn't remember climbing into bed, didn't remember getting changed out of his work clothes, didn't even remember leaving the garden and heading inside.

But he did... he must have.

In the morning, he woke, excepting to smell the freshly cut daisies his wife put in the vase next to his bed. It was their morning routine. She cuts the flowers, he makes coffee, and together they make a breakfast of eggs and bacon. The smells would overlap in the house, warding off any bad energy that one might have attracted in the night.

He had come to love it, come to appreciate their mornings. The two of them had their issues. They argued, he cheated, she wanted to divorce him. He tried so hard to convince her not to, to return to him.

She agreed, sure, but he always felt that lingering resentment. He always wondered if that resentment would bite him in the ass.

But all he smelled was that rotten earth, damp and cloying and impossible to place. It seemed to be growing out of the cracks in the house, the drywall spewing this vile, rotten thing. It was concerning.

At some point he ended up back in the garden, clippers in his hands. They were rusted shut with some sort of reddish material and try as he might he could not get them to open. He could not cut the flowers growing in front of him. His fingers reached out, attempting to trim them manually, but each time he grabbed them, blood poured from his hands, staining the clippers with the same reddish material.

Then he was in his bed again. He could feel his body sinking into the mattress, the feeling of fabric fusing with his skin, making him want to tear the place apart.

The smell overwhelmed him, permeating from his skin, oozing out of the mattress.

Where was his wife?

He tried to reach out, the sound of flesh ripping from fabric, a scream ripped out of his throat that sounded neither human nor inhuman, that sounded like it was buried under layers of Earth.

And he was back in the garden again.

And again.

And again.

Each time, the smell getting stronger. The moldy earth surrounding him with permanent fervor.

It was sickening and upsetting, and he wanted to be free, he wanted to be free of this purgatory of his own making.

He was digging in the dirt now, fingernails broken, skin torn. His blood mixed with dirt as he dug and dug and dug, skin no longer his own. He was becoming a home to worms, decomposing flesh turning to soil. He was one with the earth, a body no more.

The smell overwhelmed him again, as he sunk deeper into the earth.

Rotten.

Sickening.

Sweet.

The smell of decomposing flesh under a bed of roses.

The wife wiped her hands on her pants, inspecting her work. This would be the best fertilizer yet, she decided.

***

E Dunsmuir (they/them) is currently a college student at Flagler College studying English Literature. They've been writing since a young age, but recently have found a love for writing horror content. Aside from horror they like emo music and learning about Victorian England.