Secluded by the darkness of a small alcove leading to a disused door, I watch them striding by, blind to the aroma of their self inflicted decadence. It is like this every day: human sheep clambering for the fastest path to their daily slavery, functioning to consume whilst being consumed by their function. There are millions of them in this city, each lost in their steel and concrete misery, cultivating the sickness that is my ambrosia.

For the most part they are as oblivious to me as they are ignorant of their own decay, though every now and then one will shoot me a fleeting glance, usually with the same contempt they offer to those whose lives are less fortunate than their own. I smile at their incessant ability to mistake me for one of their own, let alone one of their homeless, even more so when the sneer comes from a body at it's apex of stink. I am more important to them than they realize.

From the passing horde of stale, spoiling bodies, the waft of a fetid bowel nearing its day skewers my senses. A short, fat, and oily man waddles by slowly, washing down his cancer feeding carcass breakfast with multiple gulps of fizzy black water. I savor the unmistakable odor of a thriving cancerous polyp deep within him; I long to eviscerate it, but I cannot ' his time is not now. Bowel cancer will take him soon though; very soon.

Most city dwellers are just like him: disconnected from the universal truth, failing to comprehend the damage they inflict unto their mother, heedless of the ravaging they inflict upon themselves, deceiving their hearts in a kaleidoscope of stench. I can smell the truth of their lives, for I am a Reeker ' one who feeds on the taint of moribund flesh so that, at the moment of death, the soul may pass without trauma and pain.

Swiftly I am drawn to an elderly lady in a floral pink jumper. The smells of the crowd entwine in an orchestra of putrification, and through it all hers resonates like a concertmaster's violin. I close my eyes and feel her nausea engulf me. With each cigarette puff her brain, desperate for oxygen, screams upon deaf ears. Not mine though, as I trace the noisomeness trail of the bloody clump jousting its way through her carotid artery.

Abruptly she stops, faces shoving past with indignation. Her hand goes limp and the cigarette falls. Without me she would feel intense agony as the ruptured blood vessel drowns her brain; today is her lucky day. I inhale deep, pulling the rankness deep inside myself, allowing it's odor to feed me. I take her pain with euphoria until her soul is safely gone.

As the crowd slows to a stand-still, onlookers peering at her fallen, contorted body, I step from the alcove and move on, magnetized to a fetor emanating from a distant office block ' a new aroma calls me.

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