Earl walked slowly across the empty roads of Cadaver.

He passed by bars which, at this time, used to be filled with laughter, beers and inappropriate comments to the young barmaids.

The town was set up in order to be a straight path to the cave. On the side of the road there were still stands, with souvenirs and toys. They usually represented the stench with some kind of green cloud coming out of a hole in the mountain. Others made bracelets with an inscription: “Once Smelled Cadaver, Everything Smells Nicer” which, as everyone who visited Cadaver would testify, is true.

There were those who profited off the young men and women so eager to find out what was in the hole. Countless stands sold nothing but ropes, paper and pen so adventurers could map the inside, torches, thick facemasks, and walkie-talkies...

Earl remembered a time he and his teenage friends used to steal those, go up to the hole and stand as close as they could to the edge challenging themselves to go in. It was always unguarded for some reason, but Earl and his friends didn’t have the balls to step into the darkness back then.

The walk took Earl about an hour. He hadn't walked across town in so long, he forgot how big it was and how small it felt.

He heard coyotes howling in the distance and guessed, finally they had the town all for their own. Earl smiled, thinking of the poor creatures trying to figure out how the slings in the park worked or how to get in one of the rusty abandoned cars.

He knew he ran across those streets growing up. Earl remembered going to school right there, on his left, Cadaver High School, where he always got the lowest grades in class. There he realized he didn't want to leave cadaver like most of his classmates. He wanted to stay and farm. The simple, predictable, structured life suited him best back then and probably now.

He saw POGO Mechanics and thought about how it had always been empty.

The church, where he got married, stood tall next to the Mayor’s Office.

For their honeymoon, he and his wife went to Las Vegas. Earl remembered getting there and being blinded by the lights and the artificiality of it all. Back in Cadaver, man and nature lived in symbiosis. In Las Vegas, man had won, and he loved to flaunt that.

When they came back, Earl took one breath of Cadaver's stench and, for as weird as it is to love such a smell, Earl fell in love with it. Not one day of his life had been spent outside of Cadaver since.

His mind had wandered so further away from reality, that he didn't realize he was at the edge of the hole on Mountain Cadaver. Earl looked back on his beloved town, gave it a quiet nod.

Maybe he, and he alone was willing to love such a place, because everyone else seemed to vanish before his own eyes. With age, he had forgotten their faces or their names, including his wife's, his parents’ or his friends’.