[Kitsa]

That's funny, but dead mouse smell sucks. The first car I ever had, a neon, had this increasingly horrible stench. It was the middle of summer and we cleaned the car inside and out, couldn't figure out where the hell it was coming from. Nothing under the seats, even pulled out the backseat, nothing in there, nothing in the wheel well. We found out (and this was August, the smell had been worsening all summer) that there was a decaying drowned mouse in the inside well of one of the tail lights. Apparently the early neons had a big problem with watertightness, and I had the very first model to come out. So the mouse had drowned in the tail light and steeped there like a teabag all summer.

Even after removing its bloated and slimy corpse, the car retained a faint scent of death until my mom was in a wreck with it, totaled the car, broke her thumb (airbag bent it all the way backwards). And that was the end of that chapter.