The whole place had a very sweet aroma I couldn’t identify.

Maybe it was also something in the air. The whole place had a very sweet aroma I couldn’t identify. It was like when the odor from a factory in New Jersey that processes flavors and fragrances wafted over and made the whole city smell like maple syrup, as if everyone was gearing up for waffles and pancakes. But this scent was way better; I couldn’t identify it but I’d definitely smelled it before. Or at least smelled small traces before. It was like sniffing a rose verses walking through a flower garden. I figured the factory must have been working on something new. They were doing a hell of a job too; whatever it was, it smelled great.

I stayed until the guy was pronounced dead and they took him away. I wanted to go home, but the cops on the scene were interviewing people. One came up to me. “Could I get your name, please?”

“Morgan Stanley Green.”

He shot me the same, “Are you kidding?” look that everyone gives me when I tell them my name. “Seriously?”

“Yep. Coincidence. Morgan was my mom’s brother; he died of leukemia when he was a little kid. Stanly was my grandpa, he died right before I was born.” This was all true, so I was being sincere. Which is why I couldn’t figure out why he was giving me a really strange look when I was talking. I just chalked it up to the situation and let him move on.

“Must be a little weird,” he said, “having the same name as a bank.”

I shook my head. “Actually I think it’s pretty cool. And my friends call me MSG.”

He breathed a sigh of, “whatever, let’s get this going.” “Anyways,” he looked up at me, “Mr. Green,” went back to his pad, “Did you see what happened here?”

“Oh yeah, I saw the whole thing. That guy had the ‘Walk’ light, and he crossing the street when the car suddenly accelerated and swerved right into him. It was nasty.”

He shot me a look. “Excuse me, ‘nasty?’”

“Yeah, like, it was, just, you know, really bad. Guy’s walking home and then BAM! Up in the air, dead before he lands.”

He looked confused. “So you saw that he was dead, when, when the body was flying through the air?”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “He was definitely dead on impact.”

“How could you know that?”

Something felt different. I started sniffing the air, “Oh, I could just tell.” I sniffed some more. “Hey, did you notice that smell is gone all of a sudden?”

He looked confused. “What smell?”

“That smell, that really sweet smell. It was everywhere, like the Maple Syrup Event, only way better.” Indeed, I could barely smell the scent anymore. But thinking about it made me feel a little jazzed.

He gave me a real hard look. “Have you been drinking tonight?”

“Oh, no sir. Came right from the office. Nothing but sugar and caffeine all day. Kills my stomach but trust me, I can barely stay awake without it.”

He took a look at my eyes, like he was examining for signs of drug use. “Well you seem pretty lively now.”

“Always been more of a night person.”

He took a second to process that before taking the rest of my info in case they needed to talk to me again. Before he walked away, he said, “I just gotta ask one thing. The teeth. Is that like, a Goth thing?”

This time, I gave the confused look. “What are you talking about?”

He just shook his head and moved on to the next person.

Wow, that's a lot of blood.

"Wow, that's a lot of blood."

The Upper East Side of Manhattan isn't home to a lot of the disaster reel type scenes like you get elsewhere in the city, but right now I was looking at a sight more hideous than I'd ever seen in a movie theater or on tv. Or maybe it just seemed that way because it was right in front if me. Either way, it didn't matter. I was looking at a guy lying in the street with a wound in his head so big, I couldn't believe the whole thing was still attached.

Once at a punk rock show I was walking into the bathroom when I saw a guy who'd obviously hit his head on something, probably something on the stage while thrashing a little too hard, that happens from time to time. His face was covered blood; there wasn't a single patch on face untainted that was bigger than a square inch , but when he put his hand down and I immediately zoomed in on the wound, I could see it was all of an inch long, if that. It was a little disappointing; I was expecting more of a Jason Vorhees powered gash. But still, The point is,  a wound that small at the base of the scalp releases enough blood to make this guy look like Carrie on prom night.

Even more disappointing was the dude at the concert ran off before I could get a better look. That most def wasn't a problem now; this guy clearly wasn't going anywhere, and the little scratch from the unfortunate mosher had nothing on the huge gash on the forehead of streetboy down there, so you can imagine how much of the red stuff I was looking at right then. It wasn't just his face, it was everywhere; there was a huge pool on the street and his shirt was so saturated that blood was dripping off the tip of his collar like an IV in a transfusion. I didn't know how I could see that, I tried to finagle my way through the crowd but the group of morbid onlookers got thick pretty quickly, so I was farther away than I ought to me to see such a minute detail. That sensory discrepancy was the furthest thing in my mind though, as I continued to focus on the entire death scene.

Oh yeah, he was dead. He was most definitely dead; I could see that right away. He was hit by a car, so hard his body was thrown nearly half a block; he was dead before he hit the ground. Still, when the paramedics got there, they tried to bring him back. It was pointless; all they did was throw more blood around. I wanted to tell them, it's like, hey, give it up. If there's a heaven, this dude's definitely in it right now. Or hell, maybe, I didn't know the guy, but through all the red, he seemed to have an honest face. In fact, he kind of looked like me, lanky with floppy hair, except his was a lot darker, or at least so it looked soaked in blood, and not quite as long, I have more of a semi-longish surfer skate-punk kind of look; not heavy metal but very indie-rock. I cut it as often as I can, but it grows really fast for some reason.

We also looked about the same age, which is to say he appeared about ten years younger than me. He looked around thirty or so, and I'd recently turned forty-one. I age pretty well. I'm often asked what my secret is, and I always say the same thing, "Sunscreen." Yes, everybody laughed at my SPF 100. Well who's laughing now?

Anyway, streetboy pretty much looked like the zombies had gotten to him, and most of the people who'd crept in to peek out of curiosity were pretty horrified. One even threw up. But I just couldn't look away. I'm sure even the guy who left a load of vomit on the road had to admit, the sight was kind of cool. In fact, I didn’t quite know why, maybe it was being in the presence of death, but somehow, I don’t think I’d ever felt more alive.