The Filthy Hermit—we'll call him that though he had long ago forgotten his name, and long ago had lost touch with anyone who might call him by name—lived in a filthy shack in the woods behind Seven Church Acres, one of the many upper middle-class subdivisions dotting Northern Virginia. In a long-ago period he scarcely recalled, the Filthy Hermit had owned one of these houses. But he'd lost all that years ago, after the war. What had happened on the front had driven him from his own mind and, regressed and deranged, he'd left his home on his return to haunt the expanse of undeveloped forest that spanned miles in every direction behind it.
Here he lived naked, like an animal, in crazed seclusion, though not quite destitute. From surviving combat he had gained a battery of skills: he could build a lean-to, cinch off a wound, fashion lethal, air-worthy spears from largish tree branches. Though he had these skills he didn't remember learning them. He scarcely knew where they came from, or had the reasoning abilities to puzzle it out. They came to him more with the ease of instinct than the fluency of training or expertise.
He no longer lived in years though he noted the passing of seasons, and so recalled that it was winter when a path had been dug out in the woods not far from his shack. For a time no one traveled this path but eventually people began occasionally wandering past. The Filthy Hermit kept an eye on it and noticed that some ambled up or back at around the same time of day, keeping schedules as best as the Filthy Hermit, lacking mechanical timepieces, could tell. An elderly man with his dog going up at midday, then back about an hour later, or a young mother with a stroller who tended to come around not long after the elderly man had gone home.
The Filthy Hermit watched these people the way a hobbyist might watch birds, as an idle pastime. But one among them attracted his special interest: a slim-waisted, black-haired girl who shuffled briskly by most early mornings—five of every seven—with a bag slung over her shoulder and wearing revealing clothes for a fecund spring melting into sultry summer. Crisp white shorts and a tight spaghetti top with the word "Pink" colored across her bosom one sunrise, say, and pleated plaid miniskirt with silky sleeveless button-down blouse the next. The Filthy Hermit liked to spy on her when she went by, or when she returned on the other side of the day, when the sun was three-quarters of the way to setting.
Because the girl's clothes were always so revealing the Filthy Hermit was free to admire her sunbronzed skin, the depilated smoothness of her thighs. Depending on the length of her blouse, sometimes he could ogle her trim midriff or, if her top was scooped in the back, the trace of her spine, the twin curves of her shoulderblades. In addition to being scanty her outfits were often form fitting, allowing the Filthy Hermit to marvel at the shape if not the color of her firm C-cup breasts, her navel (her shirt was often snug enough to trace its indentation), the narrowing of her slim waist, and the full bloom of her lap and pelvis. When she had on one of her many pairs of tight jeans the Filthy Hermit could see her womanhood was lush and developed, her hips wide and strong.
The Filthy Hermit liked to study the girl's pelvis. One morning she was passing the Filthy Hermit's choicest spot for spying on these sundry pedestrians (but already, mainly, her), reading a book while walking. Mulling over a tricky passage, she stopped in place for a minute. Standing erect, her legs touched mid-thigh but diverged as they spanned up toward her pelvis, so that the junction of her lean but molded thighs and her fleshy hips formed a V. Her figure was so young and shapely and her jeans so closely drawn around her torso that the gap between her upper, inner thighs was visible, he could see through it.
Already by then the Filthy Hermit had jacked off over and over thinking about this titillating little missy whose name he didn't even know. But this was the first time the Filthy Hermit became so aroused he was able to masturbate as he ogled the girl directly, because of this moment when the girl stood still and gave the Filthy Hermit a chance to contemplate her as he spied on her.
But she shrugged, content to let the passage in question remain a mystery, and the pleasure the Filthy Hermit got from stroking himself while she was directly in his sight proved fleeting. She began to walk off again and the Filthy Hermit tried to bring himself off by working his cock briskly and staring at her meaty rump. But she strode away too quickly, and soon he was left with only the mental image of her lush tail; her hips swayed as she strutted off, her ass ornamented with a swoopy line studded with costume jewels that crossed both of her back jeans pockets.
His memories of this moment were so arousing that he masturbated, foully, four times that night, and yet on revisiting the path to peep at her the next day he found himself overwhelmed with supercharged excitement on the most basic instinctual level. He stationed himself closer to the path than he typically did and when the girl walked by he could practically smell her. He immediately pulled out his cock, paused to pick a particularly large spot of black goo off of it, and started flicking it hard. He only needed to peer past a stray branch, little more than a twig, blowing in the warm breeze with a pair of small round leaves topping off its tip, to see her in her white minipants and yellow lace long-sleeve blouse.
This made him surmise that if she happened to look in his direction she would probably see him. Fortunately, he had become so caked with bodily excretions and nature's filth during his years in the wild that he blended well in a forest. His body was dark with black dirt and caked with old greasy semen that, from a distance, looked like drifting dandelion seeds. There were advantages to being unwashed, he mused. But the camouflage it afforded might not be enough to make up for the fact that he emitted a truly horrid stench. He gave off a kind of toxic dumpster smell mixed with the cherry burn of industrial cleanser and a stew of gathered perspiration and bacteria. The end result was smell you might expect in a busy locker room after a great catastrophe left it to rot for a year in its own sewage.
Oops. In contemplating his own odor the Filthy Hermit realized that it wasn't that he could practically smell the girl. It was that he could smell her: there was an unmistakable sweetness of perfume in the air, and in a momentary flash of looming crisis he realized if he could smell her she could probably smell him, too. He thought to scurry back to the woods but it was too late: she stopped, scrunched up her nose, and looked over in his general direction. She looked confused and a little startled, trying to assess what she was perceiving.
