I wrote this years ago and just found it in my drafts. #mammaries #wrats
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Some rats died in the ceiling at work.
As a teenhood fan of horror fiction, I've read many descriptions of the smell of rotting things, but nothing really prepares you. I guess I should be thankful that, unlike others, I could not until then automatically identify the smell of rotting death. When this problem occurred, I felt sure that something had gone wrong with the plumbing, but some sadder, more experienced souls insisted that what we were smelling was putrescence.
I passed our maintenance guy on his way in and he asked me how many bodies I thought there were. "Um, a hundred?"* The smell made my eyes weep and my sinuses cringe. I developed a migraine. But it was a Friday, and on the following Monday, we were hosting a new trustee who had been nice enough to give us five million dollars recently. It seemed important that we not make her breathe rat reek upon her visit - we had to find the source. It happened to be lying on the other side of a ceiling tile in someone's office.
Once the issue was resolved, our management company decided to place traps in the ceiling to evaluate the extent of the rat situation. This offended me. All rat traps are cruel, and the ones that aren't don't work. We live in a world overrun with critters and creatures that we can't control, and we're still doing pretty ok in spite of it here in the first world. Our building is 130 years old and shares walls with other centenarian structures that are now restaurants: if there are rats on this planet, they're gonna be AROUND. Get over it, you know? (as long as they don't die in the walls and burn your brain from the inside out with the green stench of their rotting bodies)
I didn't want them to put the traps in. If I hear one snap, I'll remember it for the rest of my life.
I kept various rodents as pets as a kid, but they never lived long. Hamsters always escaped and I grew tired of having to find them. My mother was not a big disciplinarian, but she didn't mess around on this issue - I was put on OT until the creature was found. And they were smartish - they'd find their bag of food in the night and nibble holes in it, then carry leftovers back to the rotating nests that they had carved into the carpeted corners of my closet. Hamsters hate people, btw. Every time I found them, they'd panic and run as though I had abused them, which I hadn't really. I went through a phase where I liked to gently toss them in the air and catch them...that wasn't nice, but I stopped when I realized that.
So I started buying cute feeder rats from the commercial pet store and keeping them as pets. They were only a few dollars and came in lots of unusual colors, soft beige and blue gray, or spotted like a cow. They usually died of respiratory infections within a couple of weeks, sick from living in a big plastic tray with a thousand other rats during shipping.
I bought my last pet rat from a quirky pet store in north Phoenix around '95. It's probably gone now. They had huge angelfish painted on the exterior walls, and carried all manner of snakes, pac man frogs, and screaming cockatoos. I asked for the rats and the owner shrugged and said they had some ugly feeder pups which they kept in a bin under a shelf of snake food. That's where I found Mordrid.
He was kind of cute as a baby, but plain brown, and in his adulthood he looked very much like a common sewer rat. A big one. He had oily brown fur, googly black eyes, and his tail was thick and flesh-colored, flecked with coarse, translucent hairs. Most people hated him at first, then warmed to his benign blandness.
The only thing Mordrid cared about in life was the chocolate orange from World Market. A close second was chewing the buttons off of tv remotes. He died quietly one weekend when I was out with my high school boyfriend, and it was then that I learned that my conservative, uptight mother had become attached to him after years of protest at my choice in pets. She had sat vigil by his cage and watched his little chest rattle its last, worried that she should be doing something.
As much as I may not agree with certain people, I have to respect those who love animals and vulnerable creatures. It doesn't mean you're a good person (Joe Arpaio), but it's usually a decent indicator. My mother and I have fought all my life, but the way she cared for stray animals during my childhood made an indelible impression on me. She always stopped for a loose dog running the streets, and I remember several occasions of her loading random dogs into our car with us on her morning commutes to work or my school. Granted, we kept one who ended up attacking the neighbor kid, but that's another story. Bad boy, Rufus.
I had a mouse in my house once. On a nice night in Phoenix, I had left the screen locked and door open and then gone to bed without remembering to shut the inner door. A few days later, I kept starting up in bed hearing a distinctive rustle rustle in the kitchen. Every time I rushed out, nothing was there. I deduced, in some way I can't remember, that it was a field mouse living under the refrigerator. I bought several kinds of no-kill traps, which the mouse obviously never bothered to go near to matter how may Trader Joe's peanut butter pretzels I put in there (I read they are irresistible to mice). Eventually, Fatima killed it. I woke up to the tussle, separated them, and then being ridiculous, "saved" the mouse in a container, thinking it could just like...live with us in an aquarium? Because that's what it would want. It looked ok, but died hours later from internal injuries. I felt terrible, and gained a new, surprised respect for her catness.
Rats and mice are just borrowers trying to make their way in our stupid massive footprints. They're a bit of a scourge, but before they started to die in our ceiling, we never knew about them at work. I think I may make it a point to stick a pencil in all of the rat traps, if I can find them.
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*There was one.
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