The old woman takes a long languid sniff.

“Meat,” she says. “I always smell meat on your breath. I smell the spice. The fat. It’s a beautiful thing, Mookie Pearl.”

Mother Cougar pulls away. Then looks to Skelly. “You’re next, sweetheart.”

Skelly shoots Mookie a panicked look. If she could contain a single question inside her gaze it would be a loudly shrieked “What the fuck?”

He nods. Impatient like, “hurry up”.

Skelly opens her mouth.

Mother gets all up in there. Another long sniff. “Oh, damn, what’s that? Broccoli? Tofu? Jesus Christ, girl, you a vegetarian?”

“Vegan,” Skelly says, but then she inhales through her nose and then a smell shoots up into her nostrils like a half-dead raccoon crawling up in there. Suddenly she staggers backward, blanching. Skelly turns away, bends sharp at the waist, and pukes.

Mother Cougar laughs, a gurgling guffaw. “Aw, shoot, girlie, that was your first time, wasn’t it? My bad! I should’ve warned you not to breathe through your nose. Caught a whiff of my…perfume, it seems.”

Skelly wipes her mouth. Looks to Mookie who gives her a shrug. He’s smiling. A rare sight. “You think this is funny?” she asks.

“A little.”

“Asshole.”

“Yep.”

“All right,” Mother says. “Let’s quit sniffin’ each other’s butts. See if we can’t find you who you’re lookin’ for.”

Now, at least, Skelly remembers why she became vegan in the first place.

The walk to Daisypusher from inside the gates isn’t a long one. Five minutes and they start seeing the first ramshackle house: corrugated tin tilting atop crooked walls of mold-streaked plywood. A window cut out of the wood, a flickering fire-glow coming from within – a glimpse of a dead face, half-skin and half-skull, peering out.

It’s a subterranean shantytown – the streets are paths cut between each hastily thrown-together junk-house. Mookie sees one house with a wall formed from the plow of a bulldozer; another with a roof made of the cellar doors stolen from some New York City sidewalk. One house across the way is lined with shattered broken subway tile – a sign for the Columbus Circle station hangs from wire outside a front door made from an old coffin lid. It’s hard to count from here, but in the past Mookie figured there were fifty, sixty houses here. Now it looks like that number has grown.