So, I eventually found the stink in my house. The next day I came home and opened my front door and the smell hit me like a wall of stink. Annoyed, I once again begand checking every possible place. Alan was wandering by so I dragged him in and we went searching around to no avail. Checked under the house, in the attic, in the flase ceiling but nary a dead thing was found.
A little later my sister dropped in to pick up some ghost hunter videos I recorded for her. She put her nose to work, and eventually honed in on the stink. Pointing to a crack between the dishwasher and the wall that houses it she said 'smell there'. I poked my nose in there and sure enough a horrid stink drifted up and assaulted my senses. I fished around for a flashlight and shined it into the crack, and the beady dead eyes of a rat peered back at me.
I recall now a few nights earlier that one of my cats was sprawled out and peeking under the dishwasher. I did not think much of it at the time; cats are nosey and peek into a lot of things. But now I suppose that a cat had dragged in a rat it caught somewhere, and the rat escaped and got under the dishwasher through a crack and died.
Now that I had located the smell, I had a bit of a dilemma…how to get it out. I had originally installed the dishwasher, and then installed a floor around it, so I could not pull out the dishwasher without damaging it. Finally I realized I had to cut a hole in the wall. Grabbing a jigsaw I carefully cut a hole on the wall under my sink that faced the dishwasher. Using a pair of salad tongs I reached in and grabbed the rat.
Oh my god. Holy Shit. Christ on a pogo stick. The smell was horrid. HORRID. That is what Satan smells like, decomposing rats. I hustled through the house holding the dead-rat-on-salad-tongs at arms length, and I refused to look at it. I knew that if I peered over and saw its motley decomposing body I would have puked. Even now thinking back on it I feel a little dry heave. Once outside I used my post-digger to quickly dig a little hole and I pitched the rat into it.
My salad tongs are now useless. I do not care if they are run through the dishwasher a hundred times, then dipped in cleansing acid, then coated with silver and then blessed by the pope. Those tongs are never ever again going to touch something that I eat. Ever.
As for the hole in the wall I ended up dumping a half a bottle of Lysol and then most of the contents of a box of arm and hammer carpet fresh. Took a day or two but the smell seems to be gone. I suppose sometime today I will seal up the hole.
And thus is my story of the dead rat.
On a side note, I would like to say I despise WaterFord lakes, that massive yuppie shopping complex over near UCF. I went there last night to have dinner with a friend, and the place is as horrid as I recall. It is one massive parking lot. No one walks to the stores, they get in their car and then drive over to the next store. As a result the place is a big snarl of constant traffic trying to ooze through a poorly planned street layout. Yuppies love that place, they fill it up. However I was having dinner on the patio of the Orlando Alehouse and it was like trying to eat dinner next to I4; just a constant barrage of traffic. Waterford Lake is quite simply the King of StripMalls.
Setting the dial to September 2007, nineteen years back: Ed is about to meet a rat, and the salad tongs will never recover.
Ah, the eternal drama of a smell you can’t outrun. In 2007 the protocol was: recruit a neighbor, accuse the attic, cut a hole in your own wall with a jigsaw, then bury the evidence with a post-hole digger. Today the rat would be discovered on a doorbell camera, removed by a service you booked on your phone, and the moment would be immortalized in a neighborhood group with a photo titled 'Who do I call?' Your kitchen renovation shows how much faith we had in permanent installation—a floor built around your dishwasher, as if appliances were the pyramids. Meanwhile the strip mall you loathe has become a husk in many places, outlived by delivery apps, click-and-collect, and the internet’s infinite appetite for products people don’t need. The dead-behind-the-wall horror remains, but now it comes with an influencer-sponsored enzyme spray ad before the tutorial. And those salad tongs? They'd be listed on eBay as 'vintage cursed.'
“2007 Ed, what exactly did you think was going to happen when you installed a floor around the dishwasher? Did you believe appliances achieved eternal life back then, or was that just the spirit of the age—tongs be damned?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2007 Ed: Well, Beelzebubba, you got me there. The truth? I didn't think at all, that's the thing. I put the floor in because the old linoleum looked like a crime scene, and the dishwasher worked fine, so why would I ever need to pull it out? Appliances aren't eternal, but they're like cats—you assume they'll just sit there and putter along until one day they don't, and then you're cutting holes in your drywall with a jigsaw and fishing out a dead rat with salad tongs. I guess that's the spirit of the age: hope and denial, mostly denial. The tongs are in a Ziploc bag in the shed now, probably plotting revenge. And the hole? Still not sealed. Every time I look at it, I think, well, at least I know where the stink lives now. Egads.
