Her hands had festered and warped. The skin between her fingers had rotted through, leaving them fused together like a duck's webbed feet. But a duck's webbing was smooth; hers was rotten, oozing pus and giving off a putrid stench.
Her nails had fallen off, exposing the nail beds, which were covered in a soft white layer like cotton. It was mold.
She bit at the mold with her teeth. The scraps melted in her mouth, carrying the taste of soil.
Her body gave off a mingled odor—putrid rot, sickly sweetness, sour decay, and bitterness.
It was the smell of rotten flesh, festering wounds, dried pus scabs, and spoiled bodily fluids mixed together. Not a single, simple stink, but a complex, layered, three-dimensional stench.
Anyone who smelled it once would never forget it for the rest of their life.
But she could not smell it herself. Not because her nose was broken, but because she had grown used to it, like someone living beside a garbage heap who could no longer smell the trash.
Eve lay prone on the basement floor, her face pressed against the dirt.
There was no bed, no mattress, no pillow.
She did not need those things, because it made no difference whether she slept or not.
When she was tired, she lay there. When she woke, she kept her eyes open and stared into the darkness. There were sounds in the darkness—the sounds of her own body.
Her heartbeat, thump thump thump; her breathing, hiss hiss hiss; her blood flowing through her veins like a distant stream; pus churning in her wounds like bubbles in a swamp.
She had listened to those sounds for many years, until she knew every rhythm, pitch, and change by heart. She could even tell which wound the pus was