Her scream jolted me to wakefulness.
It was a shriek hoarse with horror and the kind that one bellows only out of sheer unintelligible fright.
It peeled me off visions of vanilla ice cream and all other things
pleasant in early mornings and got me running – insufficiently attired
according to later testimony – toward the small anteroom that separated
the dining room from the kitchen.
The crescendo had not ebbed when my feet got me to the source – my
sixty-something mother standing on top of a monobloc stool pointing an
accusing finger at grayish black ball of fur that, in some other time,
would have actually passed for cute.
“That filthy rat jumped on me when I opened that cardboard box,” she said in between gasps.
But I’m getting ahead of the story.
Our house in Banawa, my home for over 20 years, got some badly needed
renovation a few months ago. And as not encumber the panday, my mother
packed up all our stuff in cardboard boxes and piled them in the
anteroom.
She’d planned to begin unpacking and returning the stuff back to where
they belonged when she had her encounter with the furry rodent that had
made a home inside one of the boxes and didn’t appreciate the intrusion.
I almost laughed my head off when I found out what had gotten my mother
scared enough to scramble up unto a monobloc chair – arthritis and a
whole slew of other ailments here and there not withstanding – post
haste.
But when she told me what was in that box the mouse had called home, I laughed no more.
Immediately I kicked the box, sending the horrible and horrified rat
scurrying out and away, and inspected the precious content with a
nervous frown and a confirmatory disgusted groan.
The box the rat chose to call home contained a volume of books. And it apparently ate
and shat where it slept, as evidenced by the bored hole in my autographed
copy of Ester Tapia, Linda Alburo and Cora Almerino’s Sinug-ang (a
Cebuano trio published by the Women in Literary Arts). Conversely, that edition included Cora’s humorous and titillating piece,
Spaghetti ala Carbonara.
Anthony Tan’s Moon over Muddas, Butch Dalisay’s Barfly, and a paperback
compendium of Palanca winning short story pieces, weren’t spared.
Revenge shall be mine, I then declared, to my mother who was now enjoying her turn to laugh.
But I was dead serious.
So out came a pellet gun and a chunk of cheese, and a directive that
all over members of the house retire to the mall for the whole day so I
can go head hunting.
It took a few hours but my quarry, that foul and evil creature of habit
capable of untold amount of damage to all things in print, finally came
back.
She (I’m assuming she was a she) slowly crept towards the box
and, while in the open, noticed the cheese. Instinctively, she hunched
low, as if to contemplate her priorities – run for cover or dive for
food.
But that brief moment of hesitation was all I needed. Puffftttt went
the pellet gun as I, after careful aim, held my breath, accessed the
trigger, took off the slack and fired.
And the rat was no more.
Sun.Star Cebu May 08, 2006
 | Burning them is so much better. My grandma did that to a couple of baby mice when she was doing one of those frenzied cleaning. |
 | too many flamables. might have one dead rat and no home afterwards. :) |
 | fly paper works just as well for our little minnies and mickies :D
|
| Yeah, and you get to watch them die...slowly. Hm, this is not good breakfast fodder. |
| if you kill it, it doesn't suffer much. |
| |
too many flamables. might have one dead rat and no home afterwards. :) 
