The Dire Girl
Dense with things that should have dispersed long ago but had instead clung stubbornly to brick, iron, broken concrete and one another.
Old blood came first, rust-rich and stale. Then sex, not in any warm or private sense, but the used, overhandled stink of bodies worked too hard in filthy places. Beneath that came petrol, cheap chemicals, rotting food, urine, damp mould and a rank, animal heat that seemed to rise not from any one body but from the whole district itself, as if the ground had been fouled over and over until it had learned to hold the scent and breathe it back.
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