The smell of sour meat is everywhere. It is like a fur coat in her nostrils, thick and tickling her nose, when she goes out to the garage. It billows from her shirt when she comes back inside, as faint as this morning’s post-shower bath spray, but there. It emanates from the tips of her fingers beneath cigarette smoke, no matter how many times she washes her hands.
She is on the highway on a cold February morning and she turns on the car heat and out it comes. She panics and thinks she should go to the police station, say, ‘I’m sure a mouse crawled up into my tailpipe or my engine to keep warm that night when I left the garage door open,’ but then they will notice that her registration expired two months ago, tow the car, and make her go to court. That is the last place she wants to go, ever since she’d screamed at that child in the supermarket and they had locked her away even though she had insisted that children were devils, they were out to get her.
She insists her boyfriend still ring the doorbell when he comes to see her; he does not go into the garage unless she asks him to take out the trash, because the only reason she wants to go out there is to get in her car and escape as fast as possible. She tells him she feels guilty for making him do her chores, but the smell makes her nauseous now that she is pregnant.
“I’m really sorry to ask you to do this for me,” she says, admiring his tall, broad-chested form under a black ribbed sweater that reminds her of the turtlenecks the Beatles wore on T.V.
“Honey, I grew up on a farm,” he says. “Smells don’t bother me.”
She hopes the smell will go away, and that her boyfriend will not offer to start looking for it, because she is certain that it resides among the piles of pizza boxes and garbage bags, empty soda cans tacky to touch, bottles of 10W-30 oil and glass cleaner.
It has stayed in the garage so far, has not permeated the inner sanctum of her house, her bedroom, her guest bathroom. But one day she thinks it hovers by the door, begins to creep its tendrils under the crack. She worries about the upholstery in her car, if it’s absorbed the odor or not, if it’s begun to tincture the heavy wool coat she bought at the Salvation Army two years ago that is in dire need of a dry-cleaning.
“Well, I honestly don’t smell it,” her boyfriend says, lighting up his cigarette and waving the match around in the air to snuff it out. He teases the neck of his green beer bottle, and his wide blue eyes are those of a fetal pig she had to dissect once in high school, glazed over and foggy. “But if it is a dead animal, there are three reasons it crawled in there. It was either chased by another animal and was wounded, in which case it would be hidden pretty well, or, it went in there to keep warm and froze to death anyway, which would mean it’s huddled somewhere, or, it ate something that didn’t agree with it and got sick and crawled in there without knowing it was going to die, in which case it would be the easiest to find.”
She thinks animals are lucky because their bodies can be found. There had been no body to find after her last miscarriage. Nothing to bring her to justice, to make her stop. She sips her wine and considers taking a shower before she makes love to him because the smell is in her skin, seeping from her pores like garlic, and her armpits are damp and sweaty.
The next day, she tells her therapist that she hadn’t meant to kill it, sometimes she just likes the needles and the knives for that is her religion, and he comforts her, saying that it was natural, her body’s answer to catharsis.
When she comes home, her boyfriend has his jeans on, ones that he’s had for three years now but still look crisp and new and flatter his form, slightly tapering at the ankle. He cuts up boxes with a knife he found in the kitchen, because he does not carry knives or tools like some men do. “I just decided to start cutting one box at a time,” he says. “I can’t really smell it, so it’s really hard for me to pinpoint where it’s strongest. Since you smell it all the time, could you point it out?”
She doesn’t want to, because she’s afraid of what they’ll both see when he pulls up the boxes and finds it, splayed and innards spilling, maybe even under the big shelf where she keeps her flashlights, laying on a mat of crispy dead leaves from three autumns ago.
“You know, the smell just makes me sick,” she says. “I need to lie down.” She goes into the house, and she can feel his eyes on her all the way, watching her back. She knows he wonders if the baby is going to survive past the second month this time. She feels like he watches her, to see if she is doing something that leads to the same death, over and over again. She knows she isn’t supposed to smoke cigarettes, but she only has one in the evening, with the half glass of red wine the doctor told her to drink. She can explain that away and make him accept it, but she feels him still looking at her. She knows he is on to her, that she doesn’t want to have his child and keeps trying to kill it.
She lays down on the threadbare cranberry-colored velvet couch and puts her feet up. She wants to put music on, but wants to keep an ear attuned to the garage, and now, she can smell it in her clothes. Strong, this time, strong enough to overtake her and make her vomit. Saliva, she starts to have too much saliva in her mouth, and she burps once, acidic, that taste of salt -
He comes inside. “I can’t find it,” he says. “But, you know, I did find this. Wasn’t this your childhood doll? Lazy-Eyed Susan?”
She struggles to sit up, but it is hard because there is a lead ball pressing on her belly, maybe even a cramp, and the smell is overwhelming, oh my God| he’d brought it in with him, on his clothes, it had finally found a free ride, had seized his arms with its smeary fingers and hitched a ride on his white T-shirt. And she beholds the doll, its glass eyes smashed out, her clothes tattered like a cat-clawed roll of toilet paper, the kitchen knife that her boyfriend claims has been missing for seven months thrust up out of its heart.
