what's that smell

Saturday night the B and I stepped outside around eight or so. It had been raining all evening, and we had been drinking beer and reading Southern novels, and it was time to find pizza or something else for dinner because drinking beer and reading Southern novels, while an excellent way to spend the evening, does not put dinner on the table.

It stunk outside. It smelled like something had crawled into the little entryway of the crawl space of the house, the one right by the front porch, and died. We decided neither of us would be going into the crawl space, where snakes and other creepy things live. We went out to a chain restaurant, where they mocked me for squeezing lemons into my Yuengling.

On Sunday, the sun came out, and the smell was worse. I checked to make sure it wasn't the trash can or the recycling, but we knew that something had died, and we resigned ourselves to the fact that we had a few days--maybe a week--for the thing to bloat and decompose and turn into jerky deep under our rental house. (We had learned that from watching Bones.) But we consoled ourselves with the fact that it did not smell in the house, and that the heat would speed up the whole process.

This morning, on the way to work, we noticed that the smell was getting worse. It still didn't smell in the house, but outside: worse. This afternoon, when we got home from the office, we found a cinder block in the backyard and carried it to the opening. We propped it up against the grating, hoping that it would maybe block the smell and prevent other animals from crawling in and dying.

As we carried the block from the backyard to the front, I noticed that the smell was stronger on the side of the house. Or not stronger. Maybe just on the wind.

I walked back and forth, slowly. No. Definitely stronger.

If this were a movie, this would be the part where the protagonist squints slowly, and then the flashbacks begin. Or the operator would call with bad news. Or if we were at this movie, the guy in front of us, who has been texting the whole time anyway, would figure out the ending and shout it REAL LOUD-LIKE AT THE SCREEN.

Wait. That bulletin board is also from Skokie. 

The call is coming from inside the house, sir. 

OH MY GOD BRUCE WILLIS IS A DEAD GUY HEY YOU GUYS I FIGURED IT OUT, BRUCE WILLIS IS A DEAD GUY!

Then, like the movies, it all became so clear: between the side of the house and the front of the house is a driveway. In the driveway sits my car, rarely driven these days. And in the trunk was one last bag of groceries from the run we'd made on Friday afternoon. Tucked behind the crate of dog towels and jumper cables. Baby carrots and chicken breats, slowly turning to soup in the heat and smelling like--you guessed it--something had died.