If a desperate family of four comes knocking on your door in the next day or two, consider giving them a break.
They might be running from the stench.
The stench of what, you might ask? Well, as they say, whaddya got?
It starts like this: The husband gets up in the middle of the night, feeling restless. As he sits in the living room, he sniffs. What is that… awful smell? Soon he goes back to bed and back to sleep. In the morning, the smell seems like a dream until he walks into the living room. There it is again, stronger.
He goes back to tell his wife about it. Long-suffering wife of a man with a highly sensitive nose, she offers some sympathetic words. When she goes out to the living room, she can certainly smell something off, but nothing to get upset about.
The day wears on. As it does, the smell seems to migrate. When the mother and son come home from an appointment, now it seems like it’s in the stairwell. What gives? By dinnertime, it’s strong, and it’s nasty. Luckily, it hasn’t rounded the corner into the kitchen area where they eat.
By the next morning, it’s a definite stench, and they start to take measures. They’re sure it’s probably something that died in the crawl space. Mother and son walk the perimeter of the house, checking all the screens. They’re all secure. They go behind the house and toward the door into the crawl space. Son decides it’s really very important for him to play on the rope swing at that exact moment.
“Please? I need your moral support!” the mother pleads.
No way. She’s gonna have to be the adult this time. She gingerly takes the cover off the entrance to the crawl space. She’s armed with a large flashlight, which will both illuminate what she doesn’t want to see and clobber anything else that makes a run for it.
The smell that wafts out of the crawl space is musty, earthen, and dark. Perhaps even a bit dank. But definitely not the smell in the house. Nothing like putrid. Nothing like something dead is slowly starting down the road to decay. Hmph.
In the day that follows they check everywhere else. They check under all the furniture. She remembers the smell of her car when the son’s sippy cup full of milk rolled under a seat on a hot summer day. They start wondering, can the smell be coming down from above? They’d had mice in the attic space. Perhaps from there?
Another day passes, the mystery still intact.
The wife has lunch with a friend who’s the wife of a contractor. She offers the sort of sensible advice that the wife of a contractor has heard before: “Well, this is a problem that will eventually take care of itself, you know.”
Big help you are. Some friend.
The smell becomes nearly unbearable. Incense is burning all the time they are in the house. They try fans. They try opening up the upstairs to get more air circulation. That results in their shared office becoming filled with the putrid stench of death.
She starts to become irrational, at home alone with the kids. Nothing the poor daughter (who is missing most of this due to day camp and who swears, in any case, that she can’t actually smell anything bad) does is right. The mother is irritated. She hates this house. She hates mice. She hates her cats, who perhaps killed the thing that is now causing the stench. She corners the cats one by one: “Did you do it?”
They don’t answer.
The family gets testy. They all have low-grade headaches from the incense-filled air. The stench hovers below the smell of the incense, gnawing at their nerves.
Then one night, they’ve just had enough. Each grabs his or her most important things, his desert island disks, her computer that holds the records of all her thoughts and desires. The son always travels light, with just an iPod and his trusty stuffed rabbit. The daughter protests, “Really, guys. What’s the big deal here? It’s not even a bad smell, really!”
They all consider leaving her behind, but that would be too cruel, even if she is pretending that she doesn’t notice the stench. Seeing the desperation in their eyes, the daughter packs a large duffel of her most important things, including three different types of tape, the entire rag bag from the hall closet, and her knight costume.
This motley crew strikes out down the road, leaving the cats behind, confused. “Was it something we did? Something we said?” asks the orange cat.
“No, stupid,” hisses one of the black cats. “We don’t talk to them, remember? They think we don’t understand English.”
“Yes,” confirms the other black cat. “They think we’re too stupid to know that they’re stepping out on us. I bet they went and got the house repossessed by the mortgage lender. That’s happening a lot these days. It’s always the cats who pay in the end. Always the cats!”
The family walks desperately down the street, peering into windows that are lighting up, displaying happy families, couples young and old, and the occasional single person eating ramen. Who will take them in? Who will believe it could be so bad?
Who will save them from the big stink?
