Furnace Home

About a week ago, the unmistakable smell of death entered our home, nestling itself around the kitchen. Considering both of us and the dog are very much alive - and, speaking for myself, smelling pretty fine these days - we came to the immediate conclusion that the stench was that of a house mouse in the early stages of decomposition.

After opening the windows, I investigated the probable culprits: under the sink. Around the trashcan. Underneath the oven. In the dog’s mouth.

After a few days of using our noses to pinpoint the source, we came to the valid conclusion that the smell was coming from a heating vent that leads directly to the furnace. The smell presented itself right around the moment we turned on the heating unit for the first time this year. If you continue putting the pieces of this puzzle together, one can infer that when I turned the thermostat from 52 degrees up to 68, I brightened a gas flame and subsequently torched the cozy furnace house of Stuart Little, who was, sadly, at home at the time.

He’d probably moved in months ago. Likely Mid-March, when the human need for a furnace in this part of the world has waned. I’m kept awake some nights by thoughts of a young mouse who just graduated college before moving to the big city to find a good-paying job and raise a family. He’d have to do all of this very quickly, of course, as mice are only expected to live for about a year.

Shorter than that, though, should they take up residency inside a gas furnace.

The mouse probably set up his bed in the safety of the exhaust stack, installed a kitchen in the return duct, a bathroom in the draft fan, yet regrettably made the grave error of putting his living room inside the combustion chamber. In the spring and summer months the location was great, giving him a clear view of the backyard on a sunny day, or a cozy nook to re-watch Ratatouille on a rainy afternoon.

Perhaps he was watching it when he heard a strange click-clack that he didn’t recognize. The low rumble of the blower pulley beginning to spin. The motor starting to churn. All the warning signs he’d read about living in a gas furnace yet he’d so wrongly chosen to ignore. He probably got away from the flame - as if he’d burned, he’d be odorless ash - but was done in by the heat. Maybe his cute, beady mouse eyes even saw the bright light before things turned to black. And now his rotting corpse, somewhere inside that furnace, is making it hard for me to make a sandwich.