Warning: This entry is not for the light of stomach.

A few days ago, we were outside playing.  All was well.  Barely a few minutes later, we caught a whiff of something and it wasn't good.  I flipped through my rolodex of scent memories and thought that it smelled like snail shells collected from the north shore and kept in a styrofoam cup for a few days in a hot car as you tried to bring them back home.  Then, it got worse.  It smelled like, I don't know... something... dead.

We went inside and talked about how gross it was.  Then, we went outside to try to figure out what the smell might be.  It was like someone had passed you a carton of milk and said, "Is this ok to drink?", knowing that they'd never ask you to smell it if it was.  We paced around the yard and isolated the odor to the center of the deck.  The deck that is too low to the ground to look under, even if you wanted to.  Having identified the location, we went back inside and told everyone that we wouldn't be going back out there for awhile.

Hours later, I told Marty that I thought something had died under the deck.  He said that of course something had died under the deck.  I asked him how he could be so sure, since it had smelled fine one minute and totally vile the next.  He said, "It's probably been under there for awhile cooking in the heat and finally burst."  Fighting back the vomit rising in my throat, I pretended that I hadn't heard him and starting thinking about how much of the deck I'd have to chop up in order to rid our yard of the dead thing.

For the next 24 hours, I looked out the window trying to see if there was something dead I could spot, hoping it wasn't something under the deck.  For a brief moment in the early morning light, I thought I saw a shape that resembled a roadkill-style squirrel, but as the light got brighter I could see it was only a pile of leaves.  I scanned the deck to see if flies were swarming up between the cracks to indicate that the dead thing was decomposing.  I watched to be sure that there weren't going to be any maggots crawling on the surface, despite Marty's reassurances that maggots couldn't climb up through the cracks.  Nothing.

Now, two days later, it's gone.  There's no smell outside but damp, warm summer air.  We can go back out and enjoy the deck and kid pool again.  And we're definitely going to wait a few years until we replace the deck.  When we do take everything apart, I want to make sure that whatever met it's fate under our deck is nothing but a pile of bones.  Or even better, unidentifiable dust.