The stench was overpowering. I couldn't imagine it being intentional, no one is that bad of a cook. When I opened the door to the hallway looking down at all the other apartment doors wondering which one concealed the course of the sickening smell, I couldn't help but gag.

I quickly shut the door and rushed to my window. Winter was ending, it wasn't exactly warm out, but it had started a thaw. I threw open the pane and let the cool fresh air cleanse the foul odor from my apartment. Still unsure as to what the cause of the most disgusting offensive small, I grabbed a towel and put it to my face.

My best guess was some one had thrown out some meat and left the trash bag in the hall. I would do my duty as an apartment dweller, and properly remove the horrible trash. Much to my disappointment there were no trash bags in the hall. A brief excursion into the stairwell assured me the source was on my floor.

I retraced my steps, trying to figure out which apartment might be holding the obviously rotten smell. Finally I determined that the apartment at the end of the hall, 404, was the most likely source.

The towel still firmly pressed against my nose; I could still sense the horrid odor. The sound of a radio could clearly be heard playing inside. I knocked gently at first. Then I began pounding. I wasn't at it very long before he manager of the building and another, an elderly man I had seen many times on the elevator who lived two doors down from me. The manager asked me in her thick accent colored by a smoker's voice if I had heard anything. I replied in the negative.

She knocked a few times, calling out the tenant’s name. With a duplicate key, she opened the door. The elderly man quickly stepped away from the door as I began retching uncontrollably. Lying inside the studio apartment was a corpse. The windows were wide open and the corpse was right in front of them. The place was tidy but the sight of the rotting body really overwhelmed everything else.

After the police arrived, the forensics team went to work. The manager had already called in a company to deodorize the hallway, mixing the smells of forensic chemicals, rotting human flesh, and lilacs into a not unpleasant melange that made everyone sneeze.

When I got a chance, I asked the coroner how long he thought the body had been in the apartment. He said it looked like two months and expressed his shock that someone hadn't reported him missing. The police noted the only messages on his answering machine were from some college requesting money and a student loan organization also trying to collect.

I was shocked too. Normally a young man, as the corpse used to be, would have a lot of friends, family and work which would all seek him out if he came up missing. His phone had been disconnected due to failure of payment a month prior. The manager handed over his mail from his mailbox to a policeman. He looked through the letters, bills and a notice from the corpse's work terminating him for absenteeism. Another officer logged onto the man's computer and gathered the messages. Nothing really personal, mostly chain letter stuffs. Spam. Some messages from his family.