Mousework

I have that post office mouse stuck in my head. The little stinker!

For years, my post office has had a bad smell. It's not all the post offices around the county. Just that one. The Backroads post office. You'd think that other people would notice, and complain. I know it's an actual problem with that facility, and not with my sinuses, because I only smell the odor in that location. For going on six years now.

It stands to reason that a single dead mouse would not still be stinkin' up the joint after all this time. The worms would be done crawling in and out, and playing pinochle on his snout. He would be a skeleton by now. No longer equipped for stinkage.

Surely, there are not generations upon generations of mice dying in that post office. It would be like some crazy hoarder house, all eaten up, with mice in the walls chewing on insulation and plaster. They'd be bunking in the P. O. boxes. A carpet of their pelts would cover the polished concrete floor. The scrolly door-frame woodwork would be marred by the gnaw marks of the mischief of mice. Cats would line the front steps, waiting to dart inside for a feline safari.

I can only attribute the long-time olfactory issue to a lone decaying rodent whose out-gassed molecules were absorbed by the porous wood of the 1917 structure. Why else would it continue to reek? That time in second grade when I left a tuna-salad sandwich in my red-and-black plaid metal lunch box at school over the weekend, it stunk pretty bad. But the smell went away by the end of the week.

The only alternative theory I can conjure is that the post office is a terrible workplace for rodents.

Picture tiny, big-eared field mice carrying their black tin lunch boxes with thermoses of mouse coffee, hard hats jauntily askew, grasping their time cards with tiny Stuart Little fingers, arriving for the night shift. Toiling away tunneling horseshoe-shaped mouse doors into the oak baseboards, mining for wedges of holey yellow cheese, disarming mouse traps like furry bomb-squad geniuses, they persevere. They have to. In order to support their large litters of offspring. Imagine the family dinner scene in Flushed Away. Uh huh. But the mice don't have a union. No American Federation of Mouse Workers. Dangerous conditions claim a mouse a day. So one is always in a state of decay. Mystery solved.

Don't think so? Submit your own theory.