Hot could not describe the immense heat wafting from the small crawl space in the back of the dimly lit closet of the upstairs room at my humble home on 16th street right off of Atlantic Avenue. The humid air radiating from this small hole in the wall first smelled of sawdust and staleness. As time went on and I committed the horrible acts I would soon partake in, the smell shifted. It had a new flavor to it almost. Not one that the normal person would call “wonderful” or “delicious”. That’s just not the kind of words you use to describe the type of smell that comes from hiding bodies in the small cubby hole of your closet, if you were ever presented such a place to hide such things.
The smell reminded me of a time in my younger years when I had stumbled upon my grandfather in his shed. He lingered over a large table as I clinged to the door frame, trying to stay quiet. An organic or metallic smell, if you could smell metals, drifted from the hard, wooden table. It seemed to be drenched in a sanguine liquid. My eyes grew large as my grandfather stepped away from the cutting table with a knife, that at the time seemed huge to my small scale self. I just witnessed my first dead being. A fawn, so delicate and perfect, laid sprawled across the table waiting to be chopped into tiny bits for a stew, or to have its head removed and be placed over the mantle in the family den. At this moment in my life something sparked inside me. The thought of having something so wild be brought to its knees and just succumb to my undying pleasure was…satisfying. I ran from the shed that day, never speaking a word of what I had seen to anyone. Not even my grandfather; who, at the age of 62, died under mysterious circumstances. I still do not think they have found his body.
My mother joined him not too long ago, now. It’s been about a week since she’s been missing. I would not dare tell anyone where she went, or how for that matter. She used to scream at my father before he left us; which, she had been doing when I used the fillet knife in the kitchen to wane her existence.  She was not a brutal mother, but nor was she a loving mother. My eternal bind with this female figure had been one of hatred. Her long nights spent out about the town only to come home and complain about the condition of the humble abode we lived in did not cut it. She pushed me over the edge.
Now, sitting in the room at the top of the stairs the morbid draft that slips through the cracks in the walls reeks of mildew and drenches the nostrils with a rancid smell of rotting flesh. The sticky, stuffy attic air slowly creeps along the skin giving an uncomfortable ominous feeling. The sweat that pools at the back of your neck gets thick enough to run down your spine. Honestly, it’s quite disgusting even to me; the one who has created such a horrible feeling in such a welcoming place. You can sense a singe of something wrong while walking around downstairs as if I had forgotten to clean up dinner for about a week. As you get closer to the stairs though, the mild air begins to taste a bit sour and almost potent. Climbing the stairs seems the worst. The feeling is almost impulsive to retreat back down the stairs to a sweeter smelling place, but curiosity loves the mysterious bitterness that drifts from the small cubby you encounter in the room at the top of the stairs in the humble home off of Atlantic Avenue on 16th street.