Rachel Podnar is a senior journalism major and writes "Podnar's Party" for the Daily News. Her views do not necessarily agree with those of the newspaper. Write to Rachel at rmpodnar@bsu.edu.
It all started on Jan. 8, when my boyfriend and I returned to Muncie from Winter Break.
That’s when Kevin, my boyfriend, told me he noticed a weird smell in his apartment but he didn't know what it was.
He told me he wanted to go to T.J. Maxx and buy a new candle. But the next day, he went to see the new “Star Wars” movie with some friends and we didn’t go to T.J. Maxx.
When I finally visited his apartment, I did notice a weird smell, but I didn’t think anything of it because I couldn't place it. We watched Netflix on his couch.
Kevin is a wildlife biology major and sometimes his major comes home with him. Like the time he went pheasant hunting, cleaned pheasant breast in the sink and tried to preserve some pheasant feathers. Another time, he cut the heads off of hunted deer for a class and the smell of deer blood lingered in his house.
By now, I've learned to just let it go when I smell something weird because I know it will resolve itself.
And so we progressed with our evening routine during that first week of school. If I went to his apartment, we mentioned the smell but tried to get past it.
His sense of smell isn’t as good as mine and it always bothered me more. I thought the festering odor was getting worse.
I thought repeatedly of Phoebe from “Friends” singing “Smelly Cat,” and inside my head I changed it to “Smelly Couch.” Kevin didn’t get the reference.
One night, I stuck my nose around the apartment, checking for pieces of decaying food or a wayward odor from a vent. But the apartment was remarkably clean, as always. It really seemed like the worst of the smell was in the couch. We wondered if some liquid leaked in over break and spoiled.
Another week went by.
The weekend of Jan. 16, we celebrated our two-year anniversary. After our romantic date of deep dish pizza and Indy Fuel hockey, we went back to his apartment to try some new craft beers we snagged at Friendly Package. We closed our romantic date by watching the always romantic “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.”
“I can’t take it,” I said between episodes. “It smells terrible in here.”
We tried to find the smell yet again. This time, we opened up the couch (which is also a futon) and Kevin grabbed the cleaning spray. He sprayed the whole inside of the couch and, honestly, it didn’t seem like it smelled that bad in there.
As we snuggled back up for another episode, my nostrils were once again filled with the indiscernible odor.
But I chose love. And I breathed through my mouth.
On the following Tuesday, I told him I could come over to his house, forgetting that this meant I would have to sit on the couch.
Again, he couldn’t smell the problem as bad as I could. I chose to breathe through my infinity scarf pulled up near my face, but I vowed not to return until the smell was taken care of.
On Wednesday night, we split a monster margarita from Puerta al Pariso in The Village, but we got there too late and the kitchen was closed. While my dreams of a margarita with tequila were more or less fulfilled, my stomach’s dreams of a taco or chips and salsa were crushed.
Luckily, Kevin had my back. Or, um, he had pizza rolls.
We went back to the apartment.
It looked like a crime scene.
The futon was completely open on the floor and a hunting knife laid on the desk.
That afternoon, Kevin had cut the bottom of the couch open and found nothing.
“You might have to do a smell test on it,” he said to me.
The night was supposed to be about a girl and a margarita, and maybe some pizza rolls, just like how our anniversary was supposed to be about two people and a pizza, but each time, the couch got in the way. This smelly couch had a nasty habit of taking center stage.
It was time.
Kevin started cooking the pizza rolls and I started smelling the couch.
I started with the cushions, which were on the floor. One definitely smelled worse than the other, but it was not the origin of the smell.
Then, I smelled the arm of the couch closest to me, farthest from the wall. It’s the arm of the side of the couch I always sit near.
Of course it smelled terrible. But it smelled worse than yesterday, or at least it seemed to.
I stuck my face in the bottom of the middle of the couch. No dice. Then to the outside of the arm I had just smelled. Bad. Very bad.
I move my nose to a different part of the same arm of the couch. Not as bad.
“I’m getting closer,” I said.
After I moved my nose around a few times (and took a few heinous breaths), I found the absolute worst smell I’ve encountered in the past two weeks. This wasn't just a “moldy/whatever” causal couch odor situation. It was Real.
Kevin put on his headlamp and grabbed the knife.
He lied down on the floor and went back to the opening he had already created, looking at the inside of the couch.
I did a cursory glance, half expecting to find a pit of black tar or a dead cat.
Nothing. A dead end.
I ran my hand along the surface of the couch arm and sensed a small, abnormal bump, about the size of a small animal.
We had found it. Kevin went to grab a pair of gloves. I went back to the microwave to finish the pizza rolls.
He found another layer of the inside of the couch he hadn’t cut into yet. A minute went by, and nothing.
Two minutes.
Three minutes.
“You’ve been going at that spot for three minutes and haven’t pulled out a single piece of organic material?” I said, seriously doubting his credentials as a wildlife major.
But then, he found it.
“Oh. Yep, that’s it,” he said, pulling a small handful out of the couch. “It’s a shrew!”
I have a serious aversion to rodents and I shouldn't have looked, but I did, quickly. I can still see the ball-ed up corpse of the poor shrew and it’s dead black eyes, too large for its tiny body.
It had been decomposing in Kevin’s futon for at least 15 days, while I unwittingly leaned against it.
The shrew was, indeed, found on the side of the couch where I often sit. So, while my nose may be more talented than Kevin’s, I had been sitting right next to the little bugger the whole time.
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