Daisy-Mae Jones was not a strange girl. She did not wear strange clothes nor have strange hair. She was, if anything, exceptionally ordinary. She spent hours each day looking in the mirror, staring into her own reflection, noticing the way she was not strange, but the way she was not particularly beautiful, either. Her room reflected her bland, though delicate, personality perfectly; its white walls never dirty, light pink bedding never stained, antique dresser always organized. She’d lay in her bed, admiring the walls, the bedding, the dresser, soaking in her own cleanliness. Her room seemed to whisper the most intimate, sacred secrets about her. 

She adored the early afternoon, when she would put on her headphones and play music, cleaning obsessively. She worked tirelessly to maintain it organized to her liking. And her vanity, her wooden vanity that crouched in between a bookshelf and a small shoe closet, was what she insisted on cleaning the most. She arranged every lipstick, every makeup brush, every comb, with such grace, such delicate precision, it was almost uncanny.

There was nothing Daisy-Mae feared more than filth. 

It was on a rainy Tuesday afternoon, though, when the smell came. A putrid, rotten smell, subtle, maybe, but strange. The smell divided itself equally throughout the room – it was not stronger nor more tantalizing on the left corner than it was on the right. And so, she looked desperately for its origin, only to find nothing out of the ordinary. 

Even after weeks of exhaustive searching, Daisy-Mae could not find from where the smell she traced after so frantically came from. She felt different. Unbalanced. 

Perhaps something was wrong inside of her, too. It was as if she had a new hunger for something she could not yet comprehend. For perfection so great, it was impossible. The smell had spoiled her cleanliness, she knew. Daisy-Mae felt filthy. She couldn’t only feel its wretched odor now. She could taste it: irony and metallic at some times, sour and rancid, like spoiled milk, at others. 

“She’s going mad!”, her mother would say. 

But she did not understand. Daisy-Mae was not a strange girl. Daisy-Mae feared filth. Daisy-Mae was clean, and her room was what reflected her personality the most.

Perhaps she had gone mad, though. She looked mad. Her fingers were raw because of the bleach, her hair unwashed and tangled, her clothes dirty and stained. She searched with such passion, with such fear of the unknown, that it seemed as if her very appearance, her ability to be monotonous, or bland, and certainly never strange, had been modified by the smell.

No matter what she scrubbed, what she burned, the odor clung to her lungs, her skin, her nostrils. She gagged, clawed at her arms, certain it had to have been seeping out of her own pores. Her mother begged her to stop, but she couldn’t. Daisy-Mae was certain the filth was inside. Inside the vanity, inside the walls, inside the closet, sure, but most of all, inside of her own body. 

On the final night, when the house was quiet and dimly lit, Daisy-Mae sat in front of her vanity, listening to the soft noise of the rain piling onto her bedroom window. She looked at her own reflection, searching desperately in her own eyes for hints of normality. But the Daisy-Mae she knew was not the one staring back at her. Her skin was gray, her lips cracked, her eyes dull and lifeless. 

It was her own fault – she was the one responsible for the smell, for the abnormality that had infiltrated her life. She lifted a maroon-colored lipstick carefully, holding it not unlike the way she held it while she did her makeup so attentively months ago. 

She could not control her own movements.

“You’re the rot”, she wrote on the mirror, basking in the ugliness she saw in her reflection. “You’ve been rotting all along”.

She touched the cool glass, terrified of what resided behind it. The stench was so hard it made her retch. Her hands trembled as she moved closer. 

Her reflection smiled, although Daisy-Mae did not.