An Unwholesome Odor is a journal entry by Jack Rusher, published here Tuesday, February 03, 2004. It is part of Journal.
Of mice and men.
“Born in the garret, in the kitchen bred.”
— Lord Byron
1. Morning
Every Sunday my flat is filled with vistors. An old fashioned literary salon takes place in my home, attended by a rotating cast of writers, artists, technologists and other such persons.
Last Sunday’s meeting was haunted by an unwholesome smell that we attributed to the cardboard boxes I had acquired from a restaurant for the purpose of packing up my ex’s belongings in anticipation of her return to collect said things later this month.
The boxes were not to blame. The smell emanates from a mammalian corpse of unknown provenance and location. I now believe, based on recent sightings and the available olfactory evidence, that there’s a dead mouse lodged within the electrical innards of my stove.
Seated upon the kitchen floor, with toolbox open and gloves donned, I am engrossed in the act of performing a post-modern deconstruction of my oven. Therapeutic questions have been posed (“how does this smell make you feel?”, “how long have you had this problem?”), but my stoic calefactor remains silent, holding the secrets of putrefaction securely within its bosom.
The mice, long heard skittering about within my walls, have only recently breached the sanctity of my home. It’s a metaphor of sorts for the separation between the poor and the ruling élite: I ignored them so long as they remained distant from me and my concern for a death among their number is occasioned only by the stink I must endure as a result.
2. Afternoon
I recovered the body of a small grey-brown mouse whom I will call, for what I hope to be obvious reasons, Mort. Mort had somehow slipped beneath the cover plate of the power inlet at the back of my kitchen range, thus ending his brief time on this Earth.
Mort had committed electrical hari-kari less than a meter from the “Rodent Proof Supersonic Deterrent” the landlord had provided me. The Supersonic Deterrent doesn’t seem terribly effective; it does little other than produce an intermittent clicking noise that irritates me much more than it does the rodent invaders.
Once I’d cleaned the odious mouse-muck from my range, I stapled Mort’s tiny body to my rent check and walked it across the road to the landlord’s office. While this gesture lacks the drama of, say, a horse’s head in one’s bed, it is my hope that they will learn from this experience, that they will take my complaints more seriously. In short, I hope they will engage the services on an exterminator and let commence operation Mousey Freedom; liberating the rodent population of my flat through judicious use of Weapons of Mouse Destruction.
3. Conclusion
My gambit was effective. The landlord sent an “exterminator” (a demented Chinese handy-man they utilize as a general fait-tout) to seal the mouse holes beneath my sink and provide me with an array of glue traps. My father’s credo that “nothing is more persuasive than a fresh corpse” is verified again.