Just in time for Halloween, I have a horrifying tale straight from my car, and it isn’t the fact that my mechanic discovered my ’08 Cobalt had its original struts. I was in Iowa for most of September, and in my final week there I noticed a smell growing in my car.  I will be the first to admit that my car can occasionally be considered a yellow trash can on wheels, but I’m typically pretty careful about tossing away actual food in the car for that very reason.  However, at the time my car was in a particularly bad state, and the smell indicated that something had been overlooked.  

After living with the smell for a week and hoping it would just go away, I finally decided to rummage through the detritus at the gas pump to find the source.  On the floor behind the driver’s seat, the very first thing I found, was an old, practically shredded, Burger King bag. This was the first sign of trouble, because I don’t remember the last time my husband and I went to Burger King, and neither does he.  I don’t even go there if he’s not with me!  

Inside the bag, I was horrified to find two nearly full orders of fries that had turned black and green and solidified to the consistency of a stiff twig.  Fuzzy green mold had grown in a thick carpet over it all, like moss over a fallen log in the forest. Some fries had spilled out onto the carpet. Disgusted with myself, and confident I’d found the source of the smell, I collected as many loose fries as I could find and threw them and the bag away.  I drove off hoping the smell would dissipate shortly.  

It didn’t, and two days later I decided to conduct a more thorough trash purge.  I lifted a reusable grocery bag off the floor behind the driver’s seat and looked straight into the glassy black eyes of mouse.  A dead mouse. I paused for about ten seconds as I processed what I was seeing, screamed a profanity at the sky, then used a newspaper to scoop the tiny carcass into the garbage bag.  I cleaned out the rest of the trash, finding a lot more black and green fries in the process, then threw it all in my uncle’s burn barrel.  

I went back to South Dakota the next day and purchased two different air fresheners when I filled the car up in the morning – strawberry and vanilla.  My hope was that the vanilla would soften the expected chemical harshness of the strawberry, but it was just as bad. The air fresheners were headache-inducing, but I preferred them over the faint smell of decomposing mouse.  The car still smells awful too. Getting that smell out of fabric is hard. I gave the car an even more thorough cleaning when I got back – vacuuming, disinfectant, fabric deodorizer, I even have a bowl of white vinegar that I leave the lid off of when parked – but the smell is still there underneath everything I’ve tried to cover it up with, and it’s at its worst when I get in after the car has sat for a while.  

Safe to say, I’m extremely unimpressed with myself.  My car was so messy that I didn’t notice when a rodent somehow crawled inside and died.  My only small comfort is that the little bastard probably died after it ate the moldy fries.