Something Smells Fishy

I could smell it as soon as I walked into our bedroom-—a faint, fishy smell. I followed my nose around the room, sniffing high and low. I couldn't quite pinpoint it, but it was definitely coming from my little office nook, a 3' by 6' writing space I've carved out of our loft. The trash can didn't appear to be the culprit, but the smell did seem stronger the lower I sniffed.

Now, my writing area could not be called neat—piles of papers, folders, boxes of ancient software, books, and magazines had become a series of lopsided towers—but I don't generally have meals while I write, so the likelihood that the odor was actually of something that once swam is pretty low. When my daughter entered the room, she recoiled in disgust and declared the whole upstairs as uninhabitable.

We had various theories. She was convinced that her grandfather had wandered up here, eaten part of some fish, and left the rest under something.

Never mind that her grandfather doesn't particularly like fish. Steak, yes. Salami, yes. Twix bars, yes. But in order to procure fish, he would have had to walk further than 7-11, another half-block to Safeway. And I don't think he's that motivated.

My first thought was to blame the dogs. It's easy to do because they can't defend themselves. Maybe Rufus found a small critter on the brink of death and brought it in our bedroom for safekeeping. To hide it from Tucker, he figured he would stuff it behind the bookcase. And suffering from an extremely short attention span, he got distracted and never returned for it.

Because Dave is the prince of earthquake preparedness, the bookcase is bolted to the wall. But if you press your face against the poster tacked above his desk and close one eye, you can shine a flashlight on the sliver of space where a rat might quietly die. Once I pulled his desk away from the wall and moved the tub of computer parts (why do we have extra keyboards and dead hard drives in a plastic storage bin under his desk anyway?) I could see quite a few dust bunnies but nothing that looked like it was once breathing.

After I moved everything off the floor to the top of my desk, I pressed my face to the wood below my feet and shone the flashlight in the half-inch of space beneath the lowest shelf of my desk. I fished out pens, paper clips, and a movie stub but found nothing that smelled particularly offensive.

I had opened the window to air out the room a bit and realized that the smell seemed strongest right by the window. Maybe it was outside? Dave checked the area beneath the window and even looked behind the washer and dryer located on the first floor directly under my writing nook. He found many plastic bags and a small hamburger-shaped book with burger recipes. But we did not uncover anything dead.

Then I had an epiphany: the air vent in the floor. Perhaps a wayward mouse slid to his demise and was under the house slowly decomposing. I had my daughter sniff the vent in her room. Nothing. Dave opened up the crawl space and the three of us took turns sniffing. I even managed a 360 sweep with a flashlight beam, hoping I suppose to see a deceased rodent who had made his final bed among the pink, fluffy insulation.

I wish I could reveal the source of the horrible smell, but we never did figure out where it came from. This morning I couldn't smell it any more, which means one of three things: 1) whatever it was disintegrated enough that there's nothing left to produce an odor, 2) some live creature carried it off (maybe I should smell our cat's breath), or 3) our noses are so used to the smell that it doesn't register any more.

Now I can't use my desk until I go through all the stuff on top of it. Does anyone out there want free SimTown software?