Fetid Vermin

Working where I do, I at first thought nothing of the slightly funky smell in my classroom this morning. I dutifully opened a wondow or two and sprayed some air freshener and figured some kid left a lingering fart from Friday. I started to get a little suspicious as my prep room smelled worse than my classroom, but still in my weekend haze I tried to ignore it. Finally, as I was in my supply closet looking for Pete knows what, it donned on me that something must have died in there somewhere. I think the exact thought process went something like this..."ick, it smells like something is rotting. But I don't think I left any food back here, did I? So what else could smell like decomposing flesh? Oh. Maybe decomposing flesh." One glance to my right revealed the remains of a mouse that must have met its end sometime Thursday night to Friday afternoon, judging from the fumes (this is a moist, warm room). Well, class was about to start, so I couldn't really deal with it at the time, but I thought I could at least get it off the floor in case a kid happened to go back there and deal with it. Being inexperienced with carcass removal (flashbask to last year and me prying the mousetrap off the mouse's crushed skull instead of realizing that the damn traps are disposable), I toyed briefly with the thought of picking it up by its tail (something I am now eternally grateful I didn't try to do) with gloves on to remove it. Instead, I fetched two small boxes from the ever-growing mound of Poptart waste that my vending project has generated and proceeded to use one box to scoop it into the other. But scooping didn't really work. Scraping is the word that would probably most adequately describe what happened. And, as further evidence of the extent of decomposition, all of the skin and fur from the left side of the creature's body remained stuck to the ground. Vomitous.

At this point, the bell rang, and I had to go out into my now more putrid classroom and pretend nothing was wrong while I taught about gas laws, lest my students cause a riot over a dead mouse. It was tough when the first thing Lebria said upon entering my room was, "it smells like a dead mouse in here." I did manage to sneak back near the end of the period with some bleach to start soaking the flesh stain for quicker removal. The minute first period ended, I took my gloves, sponge, and bucket and proceeded to my dirty work. The stain was removed easily enough, but I had to be creative about how to actually pick up the hair...it wouldn't come up with the sponge, so I got a plastic bag to add an extra layer of protection to my hand. Once I had given the floor a thorough scrub (though there is still an orangish-yellow stain on the white linoleum in that spot), I put all of my contaminated waste (mouse, boxes, sponge, plastic bag) into the larger box and dumped it into my Biohazard bin and called it a day.

Psych. I threw it out the window. I had no other choice. Then I hurried off to the grocery store to buy candles and brood. I have a $140,000 college education, and the most intellectually stimulating part of my day was removing a decaying rodent from my classroom?