Monday, December 11, 2006
Rat Trap
Rats aren't anywhere near as loveable as our fantasies dictate.
Occasionally, walking in New York City, I round a corner and see one of those giant inflatable rats union workers put up outside the headquarters of their tormentors. The first time I saw one it scared me. This is because I'm used to seeing the real thing, and the rat-shape is stamped on my subconcious like a Jungian archetype.
I live acrosss from a stable. They have lambs. They have ponies. I think they have what we have: rats. Every winter, as I'm trying to fall asleep at night. I'm usually woken up at least once by a gnawing sound from inside the walls. For the last ten years or so, there's always been something chewing away at some plaster in the ceiling. It bothered me when it started in the nineties, but the creature never descended. I slept well. In the seventies and eighties we used to have to move the refrigerator every so often, to cull the supply of rats who'd died hiding under it after ingesting the poison we'd put in the basement.
But when I felt a pitter-patter going across my quilt last week, which began a three-night vigil lasting until dawn, involving sleeping with the light on and waking up every time something shifted, I set a trap by the bed. I slept in a different room last night. This morning I got up and went to my room. I looked at a second trap I'd set, wedged between my CDs and 78s, and saw it hadn't been tripped. "Rats," I said. Then I looked by the head of my bed. I have no box spring, by the way, just a mattress on the floor. This is because I have a Victorian tendency toward clutter and can't fit an actual bed with a frame in my collector's nightmare of a sleeping quarters. Books, record players and old TVs surround my mattress. At the head of the bed is a little space. That space is where I set the main trap last night. And looking there this morning I saw a gray creature, the same shape as the giant thing the union workers put on the sidewalk to scare their oppressors, except on a slightly smaller scale.
"Mother of f**cking pearl!" I said as I picked up the trap with the rat intact and put it in a Hefty bag.
A rat in a trap still beats a congress of rats dead beneath the refrigerator. Especially if the rat is a rat which crawled within a foot of the bed you sleep in the night before you found it.
Occasionally, walking in New York City, I round a corner and see one of those giant inflatable rats union workers put up outside the headquarters of their tormentors. The first time I saw one it scared me. This is because I'm used to seeing the real thing, and the rat-shape is stamped on my subconcious like a Jungian archetype.
I live acrosss from a stable. They have lambs. They have ponies. I think they have what we have: rats. Every winter, as I'm trying to fall asleep at night. I'm usually woken up at least once by a gnawing sound from inside the walls. For the last ten years or so, there's always been something chewing away at some plaster in the ceiling. It bothered me when it started in the nineties, but the creature never descended. I slept well. In the seventies and eighties we used to have to move the refrigerator every so often, to cull the supply of rats who'd died hiding under it after ingesting the poison we'd put in the basement.
But when I felt a pitter-patter going across my quilt last week, which began a three-night vigil lasting until dawn, involving sleeping with the light on and waking up every time something shifted, I set a trap by the bed. I slept in a different room last night. This morning I got up and went to my room. I looked at a second trap I'd set, wedged between my CDs and 78s, and saw it hadn't been tripped. "Rats," I said. Then I looked by the head of my bed. I have no box spring, by the way, just a mattress on the floor. This is because I have a Victorian tendency toward clutter and can't fit an actual bed with a frame in my collector's nightmare of a sleeping quarters. Books, record players and old TVs surround my mattress. At the head of the bed is a little space. That space is where I set the main trap last night. And looking there this morning I saw a gray creature, the same shape as the giant thing the union workers put on the sidewalk to scare their oppressors, except on a slightly smaller scale.
"Mother of f**cking pearl!" I said as I picked up the trap with the rat intact and put it in a Hefty bag.
A rat in a trap still beats a congress of rats dead beneath the refrigerator. Especially if the rat is a rat which crawled within a foot of the bed you sleep in the night before you found it.
# posted by Fredwemyss @ 5:21 PM 
