Wrote another thousand words of the story in progress and I have the rest all mapped out in my head except for one piece. One connection that the detective has to make and act on before the big reveal at the end. Not quite sure how that’s going to go, but I can keep on writing until it comes to me. And I have faith that it will come to me. It always does.
When I was living in my first apartment—this would be in Halifax, Nova Scotia in about 1985—my roommate and I detected an unpleasant smell in our fridge. We looked through everything and couldn’t find the source. The days passed. The smell lingered. Maybe it got a little worse. Finally I picked up a margarine tub that I assumed (silly me) contained margarine. When I pried off the lid I was introduced to one of the nastiest smells known to mankind. A raw chicken breast well past its expiration date. Man, that was foul. (Pun only intended in the sense that I realized it was a pun when I typed the word.)
We had chicken last weekend. On the grill. Good chicken. I always seal the leftover bits, both raw and cooked, in a freezer bag with a ziplok closure. I guess the seal must have broken, or else something landed on the bag and popped it open. When I went out to take the dumpster to the road last night, it was like something from C.S.I. First I noticed the swarm of flies around the lid and the buzzing. When I opened the lid to put in the last of our trash: hoo boy. There it was again, with the added bonus of all those flies. Nasty. Nasty. Nasty. Small wonder the neighbors didn’t call the police thinking that we’d killed somebody and dumped them in the trash.
With nothing else to watch, we queued up from OnDemand a couple of older episodes of Graham Norton, a British chat show that airs after Doctor Who on Saturday nights, which is how we first discovered him last year. We don’t always watch, but usually get a good chuckle when we do. He often has on visiting performers from the US and Canada as well as local favorites. I often wonder if the North Americans have any idea what they’re getting themselves into. At the end of each episode he has “stories from the red chair,” where some random people get the chance to tell “entertaining” but brief stories. Norton has his hand on a lever and if the story is less than compelling he dumps the person over backwards. It’s sort of like The Gong Show without the gong. One of the stories told in the episodes we watched last night was by a woman who came home to find her house surrounded by the cops. The neighbors had smelled decomp (it was a dead rat in the walls of her house, apparently) and suspected foul (there’s that word again) play. It all ties together, you see. TV and real life.
