Invader

Rat! Overnight visitor, kitchen-bound, quietly slipping the drains, sliding over the pipes, back-flipping the floorboards and wham! Home and dry.

Hours of night-time fun then to be had, dancing cheek to cheek with my Co-op squirty ketchup bottle (used, abused, ultimately dismembered); playing fast and loose with my onion (undressed, discarded, spat on); and finally, shameless, nameless horror, leaving two of his ugly stools perched precariously atop my filing cabinet. When I open A-G, they declare themselves, wobble in, and squish against my Car Insurance.

But I have the measure of him. I know his fate. If I don't trap him, it is the white van for him. The one that discreetly, unmarked, draws to a halt outside, when the lady rat killer slips into the house quieter than he, when she'll place a cocktail for his evening party where he's sure to find it, how she'll lay it temptingly, to be sipped before his fun begins, and ends.

Until that point, that moment when I take revenge for his assaults on my ketchup, onions and A-G, I am rat-proofing. Against my night time invader, each evening before bed I feel around all my kitchen underskirts, plug my floorboard holes, secure my corners, niches, pipes, and I lay traps of wood and wire. Each morning, I narrow down his entry.

I have found it. That tiny gap between sink and wall. Rat! Ratty, rat rat. I have you. Count your party nights now with my onions. Number them. Three, two, one.