A month earlier, Felipe had arrived from Venezuela. Between the stress of leaving his country and
the uncertainty of starting over, sleep had become a luxury. Luckily, he had found work almost
immediately through the cousin of Ana, his first school girlfriend.

It wasn’t architecture, the profession he had studied back home, but cleaning furniture and houses
paid the bills in his new “home.”

The job itself was simple. Mix the chemicals, load the industrial machines onto the back of his bike,
find a 110-volt outlet, point the hose, and get to work.

And truth be told, he was starting to enjoy it.

The clients, however, were another story.

In just a few weeks, Felipe had received all kinds of strange requests. Some were inappropriate,
some bizarre, and some surprisingly lucrative. One client, for example, had offered a generous
amount of money to clean blood from the back seat of an armored car riddled with bullet holes.

Still, the message he received that morning felt different.

Short. Direct.

Whenever Fabián, his boss, kept things that brief, something unusual was waiting on the other side.

At six o’clock sharp, Felipe stood on the corner of his street wearing his spotless white polo shirt
and blue jeans, the company uniform.

Fabián arrived in the truck carrying enough equipment to clean an entire cemetery.

Like any decent boss, he had brought breakfast: two pastries from the corner bakery and a chocolate
milk.

Unlike most bosses, his pastries were stuffed with cheese.

They drove in silence.

When they arrived, Felipe immediately noticed the yellow police tape stretched between the utility
poles.

A police officer stopped them.

Inside, the place was crowded with people. Police officers, paramedics, forensic investigators, everyone seemed busy except Felipe, who still had no idea why they were there.

An elderly woman, probably in her eighties, greeted them and led them down a hallway.

When she opened the door, both men froze.

The room was small. In the center stood a chest-press machine. Seated on it was a man in his forties.

A large man.

And very, very dead.

The smell hit first.

Felipe had never encountered anything like it.

His stomach turned immediately.

Unable to process what he was seeing, he asked someone what had happened.

The answer was simple.

The man had been dead for several days.

As the body decomposed, gases had built up inside him, searching desperately for a way out. The room had become the unfortunate stage for that process.

While forensic investigators continued documenting the scene, the body kept changing before their eyes.

Little by little, the room had become covered in traces of the man who had once occupied it.

The story, they later learned, was almost as disturbing as the scene itself.

The man had lived alone with his elderly mother.

He was known for his violent temper.

He rarely allowed her into his room and demanded that meals be left outside the door.

When several days passed without the food being touched, concern finally outweighed fear.

She opened the door.

The smell probably helped make the decision.

That incident eventually got Felipe fired.

These days, he works at a cat café.

The pay is worse.

The fur is everywhere.

And every day, allergic customers walk through the door searching for emotional support from
animals that generally have no interest in providing it.

Felipe insists it’s still a significant improvement.