I Smell a Rat

Rats are the bane of my existence here. I hate them, but they seem to love me.

They always come over unannounced, and they help themselves to all my food. They don't even finish what they eat. So rude.

After three months of complete disrespect, I finally decided to do something in December. I had no idea that, at the end, I would yelp like a little girl.

I woke up one morning, went to work, and I'm sitting around grading papers when Brianna Janz, my health sitemate, comes over for her run around my school's track. Six laps around the terrain de foote, and you got a kilometer. Great workout, and it's the No. 1 reason I'm getting ripped.

I had heard the rat moving around my bookshelf just before she showed up, told her, and she said we should kill it. I didn't expect that from her; she can't even look at her traps after she's caught a tiny mouse, and I knew I had a rat the size of a puppy living in my house.

I figure what the hell, I'm a man, can't get upstaged by a woman! So I whip out my killing stick (I fiddled a broom handle into a spear; it still sticks inside the broom head, so it's like the poor man's version of those rich guys with their sword canes), gave her the whiffle ball bat, and we start poking around. Nothing. Not a sound coming from the book case. All I can think is, "The critter got back into the dresser."

We move into the bedroom, weapons at the ready, and we start opening drawers. Top, nothing. Middle, nothing. Only the third one left (the fourth and bottom one still lay on the floor by my door. We put back up the barricade to ensure there was no escape.) I slowly open it, and bam! There he goes!

Brianna's bashing away at him with the whiffle ball bat, I'm trying to stab him, and this rat is just squeaking like a child's toy gone beserk. He gets to the barricade, and he's just squirming around trying to get through, the entire time being beaten in the butt with a whiffle ball bat. He does get through--it's really amazing how tiny these bastards can squish themselves. How much of them is just fur--and so we run in right behind him. That's when we hear the sounds coming from the stove.

We approach, ever so slowly and stealthy. I'm ready to start stabbing, Brianna's swinging the bat, and the whole time we can hear the rat rustling. I decide to lift the stove. As soon as she sees them, I tell Brianna to swing away, not to worry about me because it's just a whiffle ball bat, and I want this furball gone. Instead she lets out a quick scream and jumps back.

This, of course, causes me to jump back. "What did you see?" I'm now screaming, concerned that he's even bigger then I thought he already was.

"There's two of them, and they look like monkeys." That stops me cold. I'm not about to go toe-to-toe with two cornered rat-monkeys. We're going to need help, so I grab the best handyman I know, the school guardian.

He shuffles in, cool as ice, grabs my normal broom, and walks over to the stove. He starts trying to grab the rats by their tails. I couldn't do that, no way, no how. The rats keep scurrying away, throwing the occasional hiss his way. He turns to us and starts counting down from five. We get it, we're ready, and then he just flips the stove over and out they come. One shoots across my spice counter, scales the book shelf and hops over my dividing wall into my bedroom. All I'm thinking is, "How did it do that?"

I quickly forget about the one that got away, however, because the other runs straight for the floor. Now, there were three of us, so we just start bashing away. We deliver an epic beat down, but he's still moving with nothing really stunning him for long.

Then the guardian just curb stomps him. Blood shoots out across my room. Brianna and I both scream. The rat tries to get back on its feet, and the guardian just brings it all down on his head. More blood shoots out, we scream again. The guardian is just laughing, and so are his kids now who have come by to catch the show.

He leads us into my bedroom, and we start searching for the other one. We check the dressers, under the bed, all over the place. The guardian believes it squeezed through my door, and I'm OK with that. I don't need a Mama Rat giving birth in my house. We walk back over to check out the kill, and that's when the death twitches start. Now, I've seen a lot of movies, and I've seen a lot of death twitches in those movies. But never a real one. I jumped up and yelped like a little girl. I knew it was a real thing, the death twitch, but there's a big difference between knowing and seeing. And I'll be damned if it's not terrifying.

That's what it takes to kill a Malagasy rat. Enjoy the pictures, folks!