You poison kings and generals messing around your bed,
but not an orphan rat hiding among your treasure vault.
You can't go that low.
No idea what set it off, maybe a case of terrible maladaptation to a loss after loss: my tiptop acer laptop self combusted after I fell back into a river while doing a research I wasn't so happy to take on. Around the time it had started to rain, too, and the roof over my head, repaired several times over before, was dripping again, making pools on the floor and wetting the books and the notebooks I heaped in a paper box under my bed. Then as though those weren't disasters enough, a stinky mouse got to visiting my closet.
In the beginning, one had to manage. You knew someone finished off by a rat: Or maybe not by a rat but something else: the boy husband ditching him and the comrades laughing off his back. A hard blow it was that one atrophied: he could not lift his butt to get to a doctor perhaps thinking that leptospirosis seemed as good a cause as any other to die of, so there, wasn't he a spectacle, Bayan NCR sending a statement read at his funeral draped with a red flag to the effect that he elevated faggotry to respectability by getting front page coverage of their partido-officiated wedding. Wouldn't one get sick when they're dead with that.
Forswearing death and publicity, I emptied my locker out, brush brush, soak with soap and water, then padded the holes through which the little pest must have gotten in. But alas, it was only paperboard I used, so no sooner had the paste dried on my fingers than mousie got to nibbling through again. I found black dried droppings, not just under the stove and around the tipped plates on the kitchen table, but also in my box of underwears. Gutted the locker clean another time, more furious washing, then on to the mall for a mouse trap, gritting my teeth at having to succumb to another atrocious lie: some icky glue for some panicky runner to step into. Damnation: the awful invention only managed to stick in your clothes and fingers, Rattie just skittered through the whole layout and has moreover moved to the gay literature department, its litter now all over your boxes of poems, paperbacks and like perishable excretions. Poison is out of the question; unpolished brown rice mixed with chicken gravvy and Baygon? That's simply horrid, outrageous. Graceless, too, and unaccounhtably stupid, immoral. You poison kings and generals messing around your bed, not an orphan rat hiding among your treasure vault. Can't go that low, Baby.
You filed a complaint at your landlady's office, a cornerstore fronting their house, only slightly implicating her cat-hating ways. Weren't she the one who made you dispose of your teener cat at your sister-in-law's charge? “I would need wood to caulk the seams and the rot in the timber. And by the way, the ceiling, too, there's a new leak right by the peg hanging my clothes everything under the bed's wet that all I do all week is mop.” She made out like she heard, and you waited for action, but all you heard from day to day was the husband's ever rising voice, gimme this gimme that, where's my other sock, where's the food in the pot get off that rack you brat. A few days later, you'd catch her sneaking out of the gate on foot, knapsack on her back, her three-year old daughter in one hand, in the other a plastic bag. It's not cars and houses alone that make a marriage tick, you knew that, ages back.
You stayed out most nights, a way to walk out of one's own vexed life. Dust accumulated on the surfaces of things, on the caps and lids of food uneaten, on the little jars and cabinets of one's will. You got to frequenting your friend's house where chaos reigns even more supreme. A huge plush sofa occupied center stage around which everyone had to slink and bad days would be when the ex-husband and call-in father telephoned and asked who's in? In the offices, you noted that the population of laptops outranks the number of the employed, and none of them as hardworking as you once were. You excused yourself out of their sorry lives and checked into net cafés, sitting around your old haunts, sipping hot chocolate and staring at the quaintly empty street at three in the morning while the waiter and the guard slept with their heads on the nearby table. Soon you were ruining files, retyping pages here, losing a bluetooth device there, later your memory stick, then your earphones.
You walked home.
You set out to bribing the neighborhood cats. Your friendship with the lot, it so happened, stopped at your doorstep. You stooped down to pick one and they hissed and scampered around. How skittish they had become. Their wives and babies kept on disappearing: not so many folks could live with the racket they make, the rough and tumble on the ceiling, their noisy lovemaking, the crash of pots and dishpans, the devastation of the trash can. Elsewise, they're so easy to tame. Leave the door open, feed them as you eat, let them saunter around, let them sleep at your feet. Soon, they'd be in your bed, on the shelf between rows of classics, on your desk on a loose sheet, the presumptuous bastards.
You never knew what happened to the little rat. Once on your way to the bathroom, you smelled death. But of course. Five cats in a room? What rat wouldn't jump over to their end? Somehow you feel bad the sorry thing didn't die the way you would have preferred for it: in between the fangs of a merciless cat, gnawed to the bone, shred after shred.
