Every once in a while, I question myself and my decisions in life, especially when it comes to my writing. The fiercest questions come to haunt me, and many have no real immediate answers
For instance: Am I really seeing a brand new book when the characters start coming to visit me in my dreams, or am I reliving something I've read in the past, since I devoured whole libraries (if allowed to select off any shelf I wished) throughout my youth and young adulthood?
Are these characters so much like people I've known that the people I based the character on will come forward to sue me at some point?
And this week: Am I perhaps writing in the wrong genre when I can so accurately describe the smell of a rotting corpse?
Well, okay. So the rotting corpse isn't human, but wouldn't a rotting human body smell the same as a rotting mouse body, but just that much more intense??
In my last post to this blog, I spoke of my daughter's cat, Meeko, who briefly earned himself the nickname "Houdini" from yours truly by manifesting himself in the garage often enough to make us wonder if we shouldn't have chosen a name for him from a J. K. Rowling novel. When we managed to find all of his secret passages from the interior part of the house to the garage, he stopped being able to perform his magic, so his attention turned to other ways to amuse himself.
Sunday evening, just after the girl offspring left the building to go to Connecticut for a few days, we heard a very loud squeeking noise from the next room. Confirming that some foolish mouse had managed to be waylaid by the cat, we closed the door and let nature take it's course, assuming that one of two things would happen:
1) The cat would kill the mouse, and we would come out of the living room to find a body in the middle of the floor with a very proud kitty standing over it, waiting for us to praise him for being a good mouser, OR
2) The mouse would manage to sneak away, cheating death for another day - or, if what I found while working in a veterinary office to be right, the mouse would crawl away, covered in cat spit (which is fatal even when the cat misses, according to myth) and die somewhere else.
Therefore, when we stepped out into the weight room to find that the cat was prone on the carpet, looking exhausted and somewhat disgusted, we assumed that choice 2 was where things landed.
Until the next morning, when the floor containing the weight room and the living room had an odd smell to it, almost as if someone had worn a pair of socks for several days before balling them up and tucking them into a corner instead of taking them down to the clothes hamper. The odor was vaguely annoying, but nothing was obvious as the source.
Since it's summer in the northern hemisphere, we have our windows open and fans blowing through to move the air, so the smell didn't seem as obvious that evening. The next morning, however, when the house was sufficiently cold and the fans were shut off to avoid dragging afternoon heat through (the house stays nice and cool this way), the odor was still there, and vaguely stronger. By that afternoon, when I returned home, a body had been brought out for me to view, almost as if the cat and dog were holding a funeral for the dead mouse and had opted to have it lay in state in the middle of the kitchen floor....
And when I wrapped it in paper towel, then put it into a garbage bag and hauled it out to the trash cans outside, I thought the smell would move outside with the body.
Obviously, I was living in a fool's paradise, for the smell was even worse the next morning, enough so that I sprayed some stuff onto the carpet that was meant to take out the odors caused by an "animal accident" - though something tells me that the creator of this miracle odor destroyer wasn't thinking "dead mouse" as the "animal accident". The spray helped for that particular moment in time, but by the time I arrived home THAT evening, I kept finding myself surprised that the police weren't pounding on my door, insisting that, since the girl child wasn't back yet, that the smell HAD to be her rotting corpse....
And there was a second mouse body displayed, this one next to the weight bench, and again, it was wrapped in a paper towel shroud, put into a garbage bag, and brought out to the outside trash cans, where an odor as strong as I was smelling inside told me that this one I was currently adding wasn't the same one from the day before, magically brought back in for my distinct displeasure.
We put some more of the smelly stuff into the carpet, rubbing it in with a stiff brush to remove all remaining odor, then vaccumed it up, throwing the powder and any dirt from the carpet into the garbage bin with the bodies. We burmed incense. We put all the fans up to full bore and slept with extra blankets when the night turned a little colder than is normal for this time of year, and that next morning, Wednesday, the house smelled much better, so we followed our normal procedure and turned off the fans for the day, keeping the cold of the night before inside the house and keeping the heat of the day outside.
When my husband got home shortly after me that evening, he showed me a large gash on one hand that he'd done on his last job. Unknown to him, he had bled on the side of his white work van, and because he works around a lot of strong chemicals, he didn't smell the outside garbage bins nor the slight smell clinging to the inside of the house. Having lived in the house for the past three days, I had gone nose dead to the slight remaining odor inside.
So when the girl child came home from her time away to see blood on the van, smelling the rotting mouse corpses in the outside bin and still smelling that smell inside the house, and finding her dad gone (he was playing 8-ball with his buddies in the pool league), she had to question what had happened. Had I perhaps decided that 32 years of marriage was more than enough and done something horrid over the three days she was gone?
The moment I started telling the story about the mice and the odor, both inside and out, the cat started rubbing for attention, making sure we knew that he was tall enough to rub his head on our thighs....
(My daughter and I are both tall women. It's scary to have a cat be able to rub his head almost at one's hip and, when he extends his paws, he can tap our waists.)
and luckily, the first thing my husband showed her was the hand he'd cut.
I was a little surprised that the police hadn't been by, just to check on the smell, until I was going over to visit the grandkids. On the side of the road, there was a porcupine, road kill from several days prior, from the look. As my car drew closer, that now familiar smell started to surround me. By the time I passed it, the odor was strong enough to make me want to gag - much stronger than the two little mice in my own covered garbage bin. In comparison, my little stench is nothing...
But I still have to wonder if this knowledge of the exact qualities of the odor of a rotting corpse will ever come to my aid in the writing of a romance novel....
Or am I writing in the wrong genre?
