Like ground beef with bones.
No, that's not right.
A pile of red and brown compost wearing tattered clothes.
Still not it. Fuck.
Look at this, though. This sticky mess smeared across the railroad tracks. It used to be a person. A son of two parents. An eater of food. A wearer of jackets, shirts, pants, and shoes.
And now he's a mess. Literally. Not even a dead body; somehow he's less than even that. Human roadkill, once-sapient fly-food, death unrecognizable- No. No.
That's not it, it doesn't work. All that can be done is to gaze on and pretend that this giant pile of lasagna doesn't smell like rancid steak.
Smell... How long has he been down there, anyway? He can't let off something this putrid the moment he dies. Half the smell is meant to be decomposition, isn't it?
Dead meat.
If that was the first time anyone had said it, it might be a description worth using.
But it wasn't, so it isn't.
There's a piece of scalp in the gutter. A long, grey clump of hair still rooted in that skull fragment. Dead keratin, dead.
A howl approaches, then a scream, then a squeal.
The train is here.