Inspired by Joshua and his gruesome tale of refridgerator discovery, I feel I must share a similar experience that happened to me a few years ago.
My mom and dad live in Tokyo nine months out of the year, and that's a damn long time to leave an empty house back here in the states, so I go to check up on it once in awhile.
Well, one winter, every single time I went back, I was accosted by gnats. Gnats kept appearing out of some secret place, and they were EVERYWHERE. They would be in the sinks, and in the toilets, and on windows, and basically buzzing around every goddamned room in the house in truly staggering numbers.
I sprayed the entire house with RAID many, many, many times, but each and every time I came back to the house, the gnats had staged a triumphant comeback. I couldn't for the life of me find the source. It was driving me fucking CRAZY.
Finally, one evening, I was going down the basement stairs to check on the furnace, when I heard a rustling to my right, sort of like a plastic bag in a wind. I moved the recycling bins out of the way to reveal an old bag of potatoes, or they had once been potatoes, but they had, in the months that elapsed since my parents left town, devolved into a strange dark mushy potato sauce that was absolutely teeming with gnats and gnat larvae. . . and one dead mouse.
I tried to ever so gently pick up the bag without spilling its contents, but I wasn't able to prevent the bag from burping forth a gasp of the most foul-smelling air ever concocted. I never ever smelled a smell that smelled like that smell smelled. The smell actually scared me.
With my heart racing and my throat retching, I ran outside with the defiled bag of potato mush and threw it high into the air, and it landed smack-dab in the middle of the driveway, where it made a sad-sounding splat and ejected a massive plume of gnats into the cold winter air. The gnats quickly dispersed, apparently nonplussed at having been so cruelly ejected from their happy potato juice stink factory home into the cruel cold air that almost certainly meant their death.
I went back into the house and finished off the remaining gnats with another heavy spraying of RAID, and the gnat problem ended right there on that fateful day.
But, I still remember that smell. That's the type of smell that sticks with you until you fucking die.
Posted by Ryan at March 4, 2004 02:42 PM
Stumble It!
