I located the source of the odor in our basement. For the last two weeks, I thought it was due to the mold that flourished after our tenant's hot water heater ruptured. No amount of bleach seemed to clear away the stench.
Then, last night, T was collecting the laundry when she noticed a bizarre, highly viscous drizzle from some insulation in the ceiling. She told me about the drizzle (it had the approximate color and flow of rubber cement), and I went down into the basement for what I realized would be a nasty job. I put on a mask and gloves and pulled the insulation down.
I now know the meaning of the word "miasma;" I feel what it means in the center of my being.
6 comments:
Rato!!!!
eee!eee! eee!
bite!bite!bite!bite!bite!
oh my god that is so incredibly gross. liquid rat. fun times.
The corpse (or cadaver: cadere, to fall), that which has irremediably come to a cropper, is cesspool, and death; it upsets even more violentely the one who confronts it as fragile and fallacious chance. A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not _signify_ death. In the presence of the signified death--a flat encephalograph, for instance--I would understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses _show me_ what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These bodily fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit--cadere, cadaver. If dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything. --Julia Kristeva (some words of comfort)
hey the department is seeking you out. you are on the list of lost alums. just so you know.
Indeed, that particular border encroached all the way up to the back door. Yet I withheld a detail in my last post, perhaps because I could not bring it to the fore.
The pathos of the situation stemmed not from the miasma, but from the knowledge that I myself had killed the beast. Its lifeless, open eyes gazed up at me--not without recrimination. And I have played again and again in my mind this week what its final hours must have been.
No projection into the nature or possible imaginings of rats was necessary, no backward glance to my childhood love of Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. No--a single detail, which I withheld until now, sufficed to cause the death agonies of the creature to take hideous shape and to assume a lachrymose poignancy that weighs heavy on me even now in the writing of this note of reply, dear Asenath.
Picked clean beside the sad corpse, I found a single, small cob of corn.
We also had a viscous rat in BFLO, but it didn't stink as much as the rats we've had in TOO HOT HERE, USA. Now, there is a nice ratty smell in the study when the weather is warm, although several years have gone by. There was also some misc. form of death happening in the walls recently (and spreading noxius fumes all through the towel closet and into the hall. Birds, perhaps? Or a fuzzy little mouse?) Gone and all too rotten.
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