RIP

Sparrow calls me when she gets home tonight and says, "Is it still stinky over there? You want me to come sniff?"

That, right there, is a true friend.

It reminds me a little of how my best friend and I have this habit of reading books that it turns out we hate, and then giving the other one the book, saying "Oh, my God, this was such an awful book!! Here, read it." The funniest part of which is that, of course, the recipient does, and then we've both read a terrible book.

We have, for the record, been known to do that with enjoyable books as well.

Anyhow, so Sparrow comes over. She walks in, and she's like, "Wow. It stinks in here. I smelled it outside. Yeah, it's probably like a dead mouse or something."

I said, what? No. No mouses, thankyouverymuch. Plus, the whole house smells. And, I pointed out, there are no signs of mice. So we poked around, looking for mouse poop or actual dead mice. She says, "Is there one in your washer?"

I....what?? NO!! But we looked in there anyway.

She says, is it the garbage? We smelled the garbage. Not the garbage. She says, is it the poop outside? Did you clean up the poop? I said, no, it doesn't smell like poop. It smells like something dead. She said, well, yeah...

Kathy Reichs, in one of her books, wrote this scene where Brennan is out with her ex-(ish-)husband's dog, and the pooch just goes nuts. Brennan notices that she smells it, too. "It" turns out to be a dead squirrel. But has some line in there that all animals have a sensitivity to the scent of putrefaction, and humans aren't any particular exception to that. I've been thinking about that passage all afternoon.

Anyway, we poke around some more, finally go outside, and I make the big old mistake of opening the little access panel to the crawlspace under the house.

Ohhhhhhhhhhh, shit.

There is definitely something dead under the house. I'm guessing it's a raccoon, or a cat. Or maybe a homeless person. Or a bear. It frickin' reeks around here.

So I called my landlord, finally. Who said, oh. Sorry. And promised to dispatch the gardener. Our doesn't speak English, earns just over minimum wage, really nice guy, now has to crawl under my house in search of the smelly smelly dead thing, poor, poor gardener.

Ew.