divine angst

This is a short little story, mostly because it doesn’t need a lot of exposition to get the horror across.

I was at the grocery on a Sunday afternoon so the place was packed. I was heading straight for the self-checkout. (Yes, I love the self-checkout except when I’m buying alcohol because then you just have to wait for the cashier to come check your ID anyway.) In front of me was a mother and her two daughters. The daughters—both tweens—were acting like morons, as tweenagers are wont to do. I was annoyed by them, but blew it off. Kids are kids, right?

That’s what I was thinking as I was trying to get around them, so I could get to the checkout lanes, when one of the daughters audibly FARTED right in front of me. Like two feet in front of me.

One part of me wanted to get sick. Another part of me wanted to grab the girl by the shoulders and smack her for being gross. A third part of me wanted to use my cart as a roadblock for the mother and tell her how GROSS her daughter was and how she should be ashamed that her daughter FARTED in the GROCERY STORE. In FRONT of me.

Instead, I sped up, cut them off right in front of the self-checkout, and took the only open station. It was the only form of polite retribution I could think of.

I noticed that my TTLB rank is now “Adorable Rodent” (or it will be when NZ Bear finishes debugging). While I think this rank is definitely better than the snake one (if only because Mr. Angst really hates snakes), I am pretty ambivalent about it since I really don’t like rodents.

Not too long ago, I lived in this great apartment. I lived there for three years and really liked it. It was big, it was cheap, and it was in a great location—I could ride the bus straight to work. OK, the management was a little lacking, and I had a few friends get towed from our parking lot, but overall, I really liked living there.

After I’d been there about a year and a half, someone bought an empty lot down the street and starting putting up some garden condos—really lovely loft-like condos, almost a sixplex, really. The lot had all these lovely trees and they saved quite a few of them, so the condos were really nicely shaded and landscaped. I liked them and, had I been in possession of some money, might have wanted to buy one.

Until I began to suffer the consequences of someone building on a formerly wooded empty lot down the street from my own home.

We got rats. And we got a lot of them. And they were pretty big. They were wood rats, and they fled the construction site. Our building had some holes in the roof and they got into the walls and suddenly, everyone had rats.

After a few months of hearing them, I opened my pantry one evening to find one staring at me from the cereal shelf. I screamed, it jumped down to the floor and ran behind the sink to its hole.

So I called the management and asked to have someone come out and set some traps. It took a week or so, but they came out. And they set old-fashioned spring traps. I looked at the traps and told my landlord quite frankly that I would not be disposing of any rats that were killed in the spring traps and she told me just to make sure to call the exterminator when a trap went off. (I don’t think glue traps are all that humane, but spring traps in the cupboards where I kept my dishes didn’t seem right to me either.)

Sure enough, one afternoon, one of the spring traps went off and I opened the cupboard door just enough to see blood, gagged, and fled my kitchen. I called four times in the next twelve hours, trying to get someone to come take it away. Finally they did, and my landlady was kind enough to send a cleaning service in to take care of the mess.

After a few more months of traps (we didn’t have any more dead ones), I asked if they could seal up the holes. I was told, no, sealing up the holes would trap them in the walls where they’d die and then things would smell. I got the logic of this, and acceded. And we didn’t see any more rats for a while.

Until one morning. This was possibly the most mortifying experience of my life.

My aunt was in town and asked to stay with me for just one night. I offered her my bed, but she said she’d be fine on the futon. So she slept in the living room on the futon and I in my room. It was a weekend. I got up that Saturday morning to find her sitting up on the futon, reading, and my stainless steel colander upside-down on the floor.

“What’s up with that?” I asked.

“Well,” she said, “I woke up this morning and saw that little guy under there walking across the floor. I didn’t want him to suffocate, so I just put the colander over him.”

Little guy? I lifted the colander and there, still and sick, was a baby rat. Sick from the poison that the exterminators had put throughout our building.

I was mortified. I got a paper grocery bag, coaxed the little guy into the bag and removed him outside. Unfortunately, he was too sick to go anywhere and died on my back porch. I never used that door, which meant I didn’t realize it until…well, it was messy, let’s just say that.

My aunt was very cool about the whole thing—she didn’t think I was dirty, and I explained the construction problem and that we’d been trying to deal with the rat issue for months. She laughed about it, asked if she could use my bathroom to shower, and then she took me to breakfast.

But inside, I was still horrified. My poor aunt had to wake up to a dying baby rat while under my hospitality. I couldn’t get past it.

That was sort of the beginning of the end—both of the rat saga and of my enjoyment of that apartment. We had a few more incidents, including another baby rat that died behind the fridge. Then our building was sold to a new company and they promptly removed all the poison and sealed up the holes. And then my roommate got two cats, and four months after that, I moved out.

It is any wonder that I still get a little queasy when I think about rodents? I know, there are genuinely adorable rodents—chinchillas, sugar gliders, hamsters, and gerbils—but all I can think of when I hear “rodent” is facing down the rat in my pantry and the dying baby rat in my living room. :::shudder::::