It Was Wednesday

By Emily McQuiggan

It was a Wednesday when she realized the smell around the house was the scent of death. It was a Wednesday and her husband had to work, and the older boy had one of his last days of school for the year, and the younger one was crying about something but who knew what. The neighbor was yelling at one of what felt like his 17 dogs and she could hear it through the windows, a constant steam of “fuck you shit up you dumb animal stop” that she knew from experience would last the whole day. There was old food in her hair and it was only 8 am and she had been up for three hours already and oh. That smell. It had been following her around for days, and she had thought it was old potatoes or a lost cup of milk but oh it was exactly like when her childhood cat had dragged birds and small rodents under the porch. But it was 8 am on a Wednesday and she had so much to do, so she put it aside until she had time.

***

“Did you smell that?” She asked her husband that night after the kids were asleep, in that exhausted, glorious hour before she would fall asleep herself. “It’s been driving me crazy.”

“Hm? What?” he asked, not looking up from his phone. “No.” She rolled her eyes and went back to her knitting.

***

The younger boy was crying again, but it wasn’t real. He was howling along with the neighbors dogs with a gleeful smile on his face. His soft brown curls shook, his little feet stomped; he was the perfect picture of childhood. She loved him, and she wanted more than anything to be alone, in the quiet, with no one touching her.

“Shut up you damn dogs!” The man next door yelled above the racket. “Shut up!” One by one the pack of dogs silenced, but her little human puppy kept howling and howling and howling. The man yelled again, incoherent, and she had a feeling of pride in herself and her husband and her brave little boy who didn’t even know that a strange man yelling might be something other than a game. She watched the trees that blocked her view of him, and wondered if they should go inside.

“Mommy! I’m a dog!” He howled again and then began to run in a circle, yipping and barking. She petted his head when he drew near to her, laughing at his antics. Then, she got out her gardening bench and began to weed, choosing to forget the man and the dogs and the bright flash of fear that had overtaken her when he yelled.

***

The smell didn’t go away. It was always in the yard, always hanging in the air like fog. Her sons ignored it, her husband didn’t know what she was talking about when she mentioned it. She searched all the garden beds, behind every bush and tree, and there were no signs of a carcass. No dead bird with broken wings, no decomposing squirrel.

When she took the boys to the library, she found herself wandering near the medical books while they played in the children’s room. Tucked into the safety of the tall shelves, she checked indexes for phantom smells, aroma hallucinations, anything to make sense of it.

She wondered if she needed a psychiatrist.

“Mom!” The older boy yelled, even though he knew better than to yell in the quiet library. “Mom, he’s hitting me! Mooooooooooom!” She placed the book back on the shelf. She was too busy for a psychiatrist. Phantom scents could wait.

***

The dogs still barked, but they seemed to be quieter. It seemed like less of a huge feral pack and more of a slightly unreasonable number of dogs for a suburban family to own. When they went on family walks she pointed out the missing dogs signs to her husband. “I’ve been hearing them less and less. I figured they sold them.”

“Who?” he asked, his camera pointed at the boys racing down the sidewalk ahead of them. “Wait a sec I want to get this audio. Everyone say ‘good bye summer!’” He shouted, and the kids obliged.

***

One night she went to the bathroom late, and stopped to look out the window at the moon. It was big in the sky, and so, so beautiful. It was reddish, and there were no clouds to block her view.

They had left the window open to let in the cool, early autumn air, and she leaned close to breathe it in. The quiet night surrounded her, and for the first time in a long time she felt at peace with her life.

It was then, feeling at peace and gazing at the moon, that she heard the dogs begin to bark, and the abrupt, painful cut off of one of them followed by a dull thud. “Quiet,” she heard a voice say, “everyone is trying to sleep.”

She couldn’t see through the trees to the neighbor’s yard, couldn’t see who had stopped the dog. Had he kicked it? At what point was she supposed to call animal control? Did they even have animal control in their county? She stared at the trees, trying to see anything, and she jumped when there was another squeal and a thud, followed by the squeak of the shed door. “Fucking animals,” the voice muttered again.

All of the dogs were quiet after that.

***

The smell seemed to be at its peak during the hot, uncomfortable days of what she had grown up calling “Indian summer” but her children called “second summer.” The air had cooled, then heated again just as the leaves started to turn. Everywhere in their yard the smell plagued her. The boys dug mud pits while she got rid of her dying plants and searched fruitlessly for the source of the smell. She peered under the porch and there was nothing, nothing at all. Even the bricks and rocks left from the people before had been moved away to other corners of the yard, mostly framing the mud pits. She shone a flashlight and poked around with a long stick until the boys came to investigate, and then they were gleefully crawling around under the dirty porch. Her skin crawled and she tried to walk away, tried to let them have their probably harmless fun, but it was too much. “Out!” She hollered at them. “Right now, or no ice cream tonight!” They ignored her and she yelled again, feeling overstimulated and wrong. She couldn’t help herself, she couldn’t stop. “Out!” She yelled, “out!”

When they finally emerged she ushered them inside so all three of them could shower. Her skin didn’t stop crawling for hours.

***

The neighbor was yelling less, she noticed. Maybe he had gotten a job, or finally gotten rid of some of his dogs.

Maybe somebody else had called the cops on him.

One autumn evening they were in their yard, the four of them huddled around the fire pit, roasting marshmallows and enjoying the chilled air. The boys kept trying to hit each other with the flaming sticks and she was getting stressed out again, feeling the urge to yell.

“Can you say something to them?” She asked her husband. “They listen to you.”

“Boys!” he said, not acknowledging her. “Say ‘hello fall!’ And look here!” They did, then continued flinging the sticks around.

Just before she spoke again, the dogs started up, a chorus of barks ringing out across the yards.

“Quiet!” The neighbor yelled, and then a female voice joined him.

“You be quiet! They’re just dogs! Leave them alone!”

He swore and yelled at her, and the dogs, then they must have gone inside because everything became muffled.

“They’ve been quieter lately,” she said to her husband, “have you noticed? This is the first time in a few weeks I’ve heard them yelling.”

“I think they ruined the shot,” he grumbled. “Boys, let's do it again! ‘Hello fall’ on three! One! Two! Three!”

***

One night when the neighbors’ cars were gone and her husband had taken the boys out, she snuck past the trees and into the yard, looking for the smell. It was stronger here, she thought, surely this was the place? She didn’t see anything, and she was about to look in the shed when the dogs spotted her. They were inside, but loud, and she ran.

It was exhilarating, running in the dark, not knowing if anyone would chase her, see her. She flew inside and locked the doors then sat in the shower until her heart rate returned to normal.

***

The boys found a bone, then another. The younger one brought it to her like it was a prize, and she screamed. The older one said “look mom!” And waved the rest of the plastic skeleton at her. “We’re making a graveyard!”

She congratulated them on their creativity, then thought about the dogs. The last time she had peered through the trees there had only been 3. Where were the others?

***

When the snow fell, she liked to wake up early and be the first to step into it. The icy chill in the air, the muffled quiet all around, the taste of it on her tongue… it was the most peace she ever knew, and she relished it. This time the snow was thick and wet, already enough inches for school to be closed. She breathed in and out, watching her breath.

She spotted movement in the bare trees, and it was one of the dogs, trotting through the unbroken snow right to her.

“Oh,” she said, not as surprised as she should have been. “What are you doing here?” The dog ran right up to her, and she was a pretty thing. A thick, brown coat, intelligent eyes. She ran right up the porch and sniffed at her, then let out a sharp bark.

“Hey!” The woman next door yelled, “get back here!” She ran through the snow, crossing into their yard and following the dog’s prints. “Sorry,” she said, grabbing the collar. “I guess the electric fence is out.”

“It’s okay,” she told the neighbor, “she seems like a sweetheart.”

The woman rolled her eyes and laughed, “Sure, I guess. Sorry again.” She dragged the whining dog away by the collar through the snow.

***

“I’m worried about the neighbors,” she told her husband as they drove around looking at Christmas lights, “the one with the dogs. There’s that smell, and they’re always yelling…”

“Smell?” he said from the passenger seat, “you’re still on that? They’re probably just growing something in that shitty shed of theirs.”

“Language,” she scolded him, glancing back at the boys strapped into the seats. They weren’t even looking out at the lights, they were looking down at their screens.

“It looks like it will fall down any day now. It’s shitty. They’ve been yelling a lot again, you said? I’ll check the app and see if anyone else has complained…” he got out his phone.

She made a left and turned towards home.

***

The smell was faint in the winter, but she thought it was still there underneath the frozen ground. She didn’t smell it anywhere else—just the backyard. And sometimes on her hands. But it was never in the park, or the playground, or the car. Never inside the house or the school. When the snow melted she looked again and found nothing, and she considered making an appointment with her doctor. She typed into the computer “brain tumor” and “am I crazy” and then immediately xed out of the results.

Did she even want to know?

***

The crocuses were popping up, and the dogs were outside again, more of them then in the fall. It was a pack again, a growing one. She heard the high pitched barks of puppies alongside the deeper howls of adults.

She smelled blood.

Her boys picked flowers and wove them into a crown that they placed on her head. She hugged them, and laughed with them when it fell apart into her hair.

***

“I think I need to call animal control,” she told her husband while he watched tv. “I think it’s a puppy mill.”

“What is?” he wasn’t paying attention to her or the show, he was swiping on his phone, putting squares into other squares.

“Next door,” she told him, barely holding on to her patience, “the dogs? I think it’s a puppy mill.”

“Didn’t they shut all those down? C'mon babe, someone would have done something if there was a puppy mill back there. This is a nice, normal neighborhood. Did you even see any puppies?”

“There’s something in their shed,” she insisted. “You said yourself it’s weird.”

“No one else has said anything on the app. I think it’s in your head.”

She smiled, nodded, then walked away, hardly able to contain her anger.

***

The smell got worse. It was still the smell of death, but now it was also the smell of dog and urine and waste. She hated it, could hardly stand to be outside at all.

“Let’s go for a walk,” she told the boys, pulling them away from their mud pit. “I need to stretch my legs.”

***

Every morning she searched the paper for a news story about it. They had so many neighbors, someone must have complained right? Someone besides her had to have noticed the dogs, the noise, the godforsaken smell.

“Why do we even get the paper anymore?” her husband asked. “It’s all online.”

“Crafts,” she said, folding it up neatly.

***

The trees were too thick to see through at this time of year. All that lush greenery blocking her view. She walked by the front of their house as many times a day as she dared, but never saw anything of note.

Until one day, the woman who had come in her yard was outside, alone.

“Hi!” She said brightly, slowing to a stop. “We met last winter! How is your dog doing?” The woman stared at her, so she gestured towards her house. “I live over there.”

“Oh. We’re fine! She’s fine!”

“We’ve been thinking about getting a puppy,” she said, as casually as she could. “We’ve got two little boys, you know? And I’ve been thinking a puppy would be great for them to grow up with.”

“Oh?” The woman looked her up and down, and then seemed to dismiss her. “Make sure you get something purebred. You never know what you’re getting with a mutt.”

“Know any breeders?”

The woman looked up sharply and seemed to see her for the first time. “No.” She said simply, then walked away.

***

As the weather grew warmer, the smell got worse. The smell got worse, and the dogs got louder. The big, lush yard that had been half the reason they had bought the house felt unusable. She couldn’t watch the boys out there without gagging. She couldn’t stomach the idea of eating a vegetable grown in that putrid air. They started going to parks instead, and then, when it was too hot, staying inside.

Instead of family walks, her husband played racecar games with the boys on the new tv he had bought. They dashed through digital landscapes brighter and more dead than anything she could show them in reality.

***

Her husband bought her a smart watch. It picked up the way her heart rate spiked whenever she stepped outside, or the barking got loud enough to hear inside.

She bought a new phone.

She stayed inside.

The summer passed quickly.

***

It was a Wednesday when she realized how much she hated her life. She hated lying on the floor waiting for her younger son to fall asleep. She hated waiting in the pick up line for her older son.
She hated the shows they watched, and the games they played.
She hated the way the tomatoes from the grocery store tasted.
The leaves were almost gone when she got them outside again. The air was crisp and all she could smell was the rich musty scent of the piles of leaves in the yard. The boys ran through them over and over again, and she told herself that it didn’t matter. She sat with a book, half reading and half watching them. It felt good to be outside, good to watch her boys run with the full strength of their legs. The neighborhood felt quiet, and she wondered why she had let a couple of annoying dogs keep her from this for so many months. Maybe her husband had been right and the smell had been in her head the whole time. Maybe the barking was too.

It wasn’t long before the boys found a ball and started chasing it around the yard in a game that wasn’t quite soccer, or anything really, other than the need to chase. The ball bounced into the neighbors yard, blocked from view by the shed and the trees. “I’ll get it!” Her older son yelled, scrambling over the leaves and brush.

She started to protest, thinking about the dogs, but before she could raise her voice to call him back he was there in the yard, walking around the shed.

“It’s full of stuffies!” he laughed, and she felt her blood run cold. He bent to pick up the ball, and as she ran toward him she heard the creak of the shed door, and she knew it was too late. She knew she had been right, and that her boy, her innocent boy, was going to see something horrible.

She yelled at him to stop and she stumbled across the yards to him, but then he was screaming, and the dogs inside the neighbors house were barking, and by the time she reached him she was screaming too.

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