What Goes Stink In The Night

Mice are always a prevalent problem for us. We have critters, and they eat grain; and they leave particles of their feed on the ground. We spill, on occasion, leaving more grain on the ground. So, ice pretty much have a free buffet. Why don’t we keep cats? They eat mice, right? Well, they do if they are not given free choice kibble. Cats, like all creatures, maybe more so than others, are lazy. Why hunt when they can lay about all day and eat as they please? And while they are at it, they poop everywhere, spray in the porch, dig up plants, and stock my rabbits and baby chicks They will hunt my rabbits but not the stupid mice. We cannot get our neighbor to stop putting out free choice cat food.

I thought about snakes, like a boa, but it’s too cold here. [image error]Weasels-too expensive, and the dogs would eat them. Poison is completely out of the question. So, it is traps. Lots of traps. But mice are not as stupid as you might think. Once you catch one, you have to move the trap to another location. And with all the grain and hay laying around for them, they are pretty picky about what they will eat.

This year, they have been exceptionally terrible, and they moved into the house as well as everyplace else. I can hear them at night while I lay awake. They crawled around through the walls, sometimes falling through the insulation, bumping and tumbling. I can hear them chew and chitter, squeak and squabble. I knew then that we were headed for a problem. A stinking kind of problem.

It started in the warm part of the day. Just the small hint of decaying flesh as it heated up. By nightfall it would fade some. But as time wore on, the smell became more atrocious, and did not fade.

I noticed first, as I tried to sleep; the noises were gone. I hadn’t heard anyone in the walls for a while. Several days. Who knew how many of them were trapped in the insulation, rotting? And because all the activity had gone on near and above my head while in bed, it was not exactly a place we could just avoid for a time. It was of course possible that the dead lay under the bed, not in the wall. As their stench rose to a disgusting level, we had to take action. First order was to burn the sensi pretty much 24/7. But that wasn’t enough. So, we whipped lavender oil on our pillow cases, under our noses, and kept a soaked cotton ball close to hand for when the walls of comfort were breached.

[image error]How long can a mouse stink you ask? A long time, actually. And the odor is not a little one just because the body is small. The fetor spread through the house, we couldn’t get away from it. Something was going to have to be done. Those of you that have been to our little cabin know just exactly how small it is. Those of you who are new to us, well, our house is exceptionally small. There was no place to get away!

We could not just lift the bed and hunt under it to see if we could find the corpse. Nor could we crawl under it, the frame was too low. We had a plan to fix that, but that was a job for later. Much later, like… next year. It was a major operation to lift the mattress enough to get under the frame. I can’t lift, so that left it to Laura.

Neither of us were real keen on the job. We had planned to get some work done in the shop. I hoped that this would be a quick job and then we’d move on. Hopefully with the source found and disposed of. Again, if you know us at all, you know that our life is lived in chaos. In other words, we cannot plan anything without a hurricane coming in and tangling things up. Unforeseen events always, I mean ALWAYS, pop up. That is chaos, and our life is ensnared by chaos.[image error]

Why don’t we try and raise the bed while we are at it, that way we can actually get under it to remove carcasses and use the under-bed for storage. Sure, how are we going to do this? The frame was already held up by blocks of wood. If we added more blocks, it would just make the thing unstable. What about just building our own frame? Major project, it would take all day. What about carving holes into 4×4 wood posts and putting the bed legs inside the hole? Hmmm, we were skeptical, but maybe it was a happy medium between not doing anything and building a full frame. It took about an hour to drill holes in the 4x4s, and we headed for the bed. Of course, we had to clear it off, and around it, enough to just life the box-spring and mattress off the frame. All the while, the stench of decay filled our nostrils until the sense of smell was burned away.

 

So, all the stuff that was on the bed, and around it, was now stuffed into my desk area. There was a big trunk, now it filled the kitchen, and a bench that now blocked the front door. No problem, this was going to be quick. Laura moved into place and pulled the mattress away from the wall, trying to lift it off the frame. Frame and all moved away when she pulled, revealing all the little boxes we had managed to stuff under the bed. Laura moved around to the head of the bed. Keep in mind size, ok.

[image error]

The bed nook

Because our bed is tucked away in a corner where you really can only access it from the foot. There are walls on two sides, and a very, very, narrow space against another wall. Moving around was difficult. Laura was grumbling, I was still trying to keep a positive outlook. I wasn’t the one struggling with trying to move the stupid bed, though. She managed to lift the bed and I crawled and writhed around, getting under the mattress and picking up the little boxes, then trying to wiggle back out without bumping Laura or spilling the box’s contents onto the ground. There were a lot of little boxes, and bending, twisting, and crouching was killing me. Spasms in my back started right away, and nice stabs followed up.

“If you get me a board, I can prop this up and then I can help you with the boxes,” Laura suggested.

Excellent. I moved the boxes and the bench that was blocking our way in, and went on the hunt for a long board. We have lots of scrap stuff laying around and I quickly found a board I thought would work. It did work, and we were able to remove the remaining stuff from beneath the bed. Now that all the boxes were gone, we could see there was no dead mouse. But we did sweep, and the bed started to fall. It landed on my computer screen that is mounted on the wall so that I can still work while I am down. Laura supported the bed and I unscrewed the screen from the mount as fast as I could. I did not want the mount or the screen damaged. I quickly struggled out from the tiny hole that was our work space, and put the screen on my desk, just behind my other monitor.

I grabbed the 4x4s and squished my way into the space with Laura, again. It was then that we noticed that the bed frame had come unscrewed at some point, and was askew. “I’ll go find some nuts and bolts,“ I said, squeezing back out.

I went on the hunt, going to my tool shelves and looking in the most obvious places first. I try very hard to keep my shelves organized. But I just can’t manage to keep it that way. It took a little while to find a few nuts with fitting bolts. Laura came out to help. I get the bolts, we take them in and re-assemble the bed frame. While I had been gone, Laura had scrubbed the floor with a potent bleach solution. It helped with the smell remarkably, but before long it only helped for a little while.

We stuck the 4x4s on the stupid bed frame legs and gave it a jiggle. Completely and utterly unstable.

“We have two choices,” I stated flatly. “We can just put it back the way it was, or we could do the frame.”

“What would be faster?” she asked.

The smell was stronger than ever now, as if we had disturbed the corpse, although we had found no sign of the dead body.

[image error]“We need to decide what to do about the smell,” I interjected.

“Do we have any lime left?”

“No lime.”

“Hang on,” Laura said and squished through the tiny little space we had between the wall and the propped-up bed. She came back shortly and handed me a bottle of scented oil. “Use this. Use all of it.”

I spread it on the wall where our heads lay while in bed. It smelled much better, mostly gone.

“So, just putting it back is probably the fastest,” I groaned, leaning against the wall.

“But we already have it all torn up. How much longer for a frame?”

I calculated, building the thing in my head. “Not long if I can find boards the right length.”

So out we went again, pulling out boards and cutting them to size. When we went back in the house with the boards, we both notice the smell had returned, but now the worst of it had moved into the kitchen area. I accused the large amount of dirt we had swept out from under the bed area. “Maybe the dirt has some of the body fluids mixed in it.”

“Maybe,” Laura said, making a face. “It is defiantly out here more now. You looked through the boxes?”

“No mice in the boxes, just food, candy wrappers, and poop.”

“Well, let’s get this done and then worry about the smell.”

I drilled, Laura held boards and handed them to me, and in a decent amount of time, the frame was built, and it was time to put the mattresses back down. We pulled on the frame to get it away from the wall, and we found that part of the frame was about a quarter inch too long. I sighed. “You are a terrible carpenter,” Laura says.

“I know,” I agreed with a laugh. It was a quick fix with my oscillating saw, and down the mattresses went onto the new frame. It raised the bed considerably, making underneath more accessible. I could do a low crawl and get to the back wall. However, I made another observation. “Kess is going to have a hard time making it up there.”

“I have some ideas,” Laura said. “I will be right back.”

While she was gone, I swept up all the nasty dirt and disposed of it, getting it out of the house. The smell still lingered, strongly. We were gonna need more bleach, or something.

Laura came back, and I told her we needed to get the stuff out of my area, so I could sit for a while. We got all the blankets, pillows, and stuffed animals back onto the bed. I sat down in my chair, wrinkling my nose. The smell was still quite terrible! I looked down, shaking my head. Why had it moved and why was it still smelling so bad!? I noticed something on my keyboard, it was a string… no, it wasn’t. It was a tail. I followed the tail with my eyes, coming to a bloated, seeping body with green skin and part of its hair missing.

[image error]“Uh,” I said, lifting the corpse by its tail. “I found it.”

“Ewww,” Laura made a face.

“It couldn’t have been there all this time, I just cleaned my desk off this morning, before we started all of this,” I stated, still holding the mouse up.

“Well, it didn’t just die,” Laura deducted, “it’s already decomposing.”

“Then how did it get to my desk? Zombie?”

[image error]I looked on my desk to see what had been moved to it while we’d hunted for the smell. All that was there was my screen. “It had to of been stuck to my screen. But…”

“Just start by getting rid of it, will you?” Laura asked.

“Right.” I took the rotting corpse out to the chicken coop and tossed it. The chickens moved in, someone grabbing it and running. They love mouse.

I returned to the scene of the body drop. I picked up my screen and inspected it. Right where the monitor attached to the mount, on a bottom corner, was a bit of hair and body goo. I looked to where the mouse had been laying upon my discovery. There was a puddle of ooze.

“Ok, I am officially grossed out,” I stated. Laura was already handing me a good strong cleaner in a spray bottle and I went to work. I found more slime and hair on my monitor mount on the wall above the bed. I scrubbed it three or four times. I remember when I had taken it off the mount, the bottom screw was loose, and one was missing. I surmise that the mouse had managed to force its way between the monitor and the wall mount and then became stuck. How I had missed that while unscrewing the monitor, and putting it on my desk is worrisome. However, the lighting had been nearly no-existent, and I had been in a great hurry to get both items out of harm’s way. But still, I missed the dead, decaying mouse; and it leaked onto my desk. You can guess that my desk-every inch of it-has been thoroughly scrubbed and cleaned. Several times.

The mouse is gone, and the smell mostly gone, just a faint odor reaining. I would guess that there is still something dead in the wall. “Do you want to take the wall out?” Laura asked.

“No,” I stated emphatically. “I do not want to take out the wall. It isn’t so bad now. We can cover it with sensi and lavender.”

“Oh good,” Laura sighed.

It was time to milk. The day was gone. Hunting down one little dead mouse had taken all day. Stupid mouse. Stupid Wall. Stupid Bed.