To Kill A Rat

It all began when my mom breaks the news that banana peelings are mysteriously disappearing from the trashcan in our kitchen.


I use to live in an apartment 6 stories above ground, with three rooms and a bath. There is the master bedroom, my room, and the storage room. Strangely, the size of the so called storage room challenges the size of the master. The temperature in the storage is unusually cold compared to the rest of our apartment, probably due to the fact that there is a gaping hole in the ceiling connecting the storage to the apartment above. I once visited our very friendly neighbor upstairs and the first impression he gave me was "holy shit, what did your mom feed you!?" He is like one of those Sumo wrestlers, dribbling with fat and wears a shirts that is always soaked in his sweat. To compensate for his overly excessive heat buildups underneath all that insulation, he has an apartment of arctic climate. I don't know how he does it, the moment he opened the door I begin to shiver from the cold and my own breaths can clearly be seen. This is not an apartment, it is an industrial grade freezer! He invited me into his subzero climate zone and immediately after I entered, I tripped over a box, stacked on top of another box. Things are littered everywhere, old ones, new ones, broken ones, everything he had once owned. At that moment it had occurred to me that he is a hoarder, which explains where the rat that resided itself in our storage room came from.


Enough of our arctic explorer upstairs, the banana peelings were mysteriously missing, we were all confused. I mean who would break in to just steal banana peelings? To solve the mystery, we all took turns to stay up in the dead of night the following day to see just how banana peelings are running away from their home.


***


4:00 A.M. I'm sitting in a seat facing the trashcan in the kitchen, watching the banana peel we put there the night before. This is really silly, I know, but my parents won't approve of my "putting a tracking device on the peel" idea. They claimed that it was too smart of a gadget for such a dumb task. So now I'm up at four in the morning, staring at a trashcan, imagining all the ways which a banana peel can disappear from it. I guess you must do dumb things to solve dumb problems.


4:30 A.M. The peel is still there, unmoved. Boring. I think I might just close my eyes for a second.


6:00 A.M. I opened my eyes to check on the peel, it was gone. Oops, and since I couldn't put up an amber alert for the peel, I sneak back into my room and lay down to relieve the throbbing pain in my neck.


8:00 A.M. Woke up to my mom yelling at me, and she tasked me with an irresistible job, to find the peel that had slipped away under my supervision. Of course, I didn't actually looked for any peelings, all I did was moved some tables and chairs around the house and pretended that I looked everywhere for it.


***


A few days later, my mom notices ungodly smell of rotten banana peelings in the storage room. Knowing that I wouldn't actually look for the peelings, she armed herself with a pair of tongs and entered the storage room to look for them. Soon she came running out, shrieking and accusing me of letting a mouse into our apartment. To this day, I'm not sure why she had thought that I had let a rat into our apartment.


When my dad returned home from work he was forced to go after the rat, imprisoned in the storage room. It was actually really hard for my dad too, to go after a thing that he dreaded the most. In order for him to enter the room, I had to go with him, carrying a stick and a flash light to help flush out the rat hiding somewhere inside.


At first we weren't able to find this uninvited fussy little thing. I pointed the flashlight everywhere, hit places and shouted threats to the rat. The only thing that moved was the boxes that I hit. Finally after about 20 minutes of nonsense, I saw a triangular looking thing sticking out underneath a table. I knelt down to get a better look at it and it started to run in a circle wildly. It was so sudden that it made me jump, almost out of my own skin.


I chased the rat into a corner and everything after this point goes downhill for the rat. It made an attempt to escape, running up a bamboo stick which leads to another bamboo stick hanging horizontally across the room. I was amazed by the acrobatic ability of the rat, running across a stick smaller than my pinky finger at an incredible speed.  For a moment I actually thought that the rat was going to escape, at least temporary, but my dad picked up a tennis racket and he took aim... He smashed the racket into the rat.


SPLAT! Gore and blood everywhere.


No really. My dad actually missed the rat by a hair, but he bent the flexible bamboo stick enough that the rat was shot off of it. The rat flew high into the air, which made me felt like a child in an amusement park. Laughing my guts out and clapping with such enthusiasm that I lost all my strength. After spending some time flying across the room the rat finally hit the ground, dazed by the experience the rat stumbles around. My dad then picked up the thing with the tong my mom left in the room and drop it into a plastic bag, and he threw it out of a 6th story balcony through a window.


The next morning I took a walk  like I always do, and I happened to sight a plastic bag in the flowerbed in front of our balcony 6 stories high. I walked up to the flowerbed and studied the bag.


Through a ripped hole, I can see rat droppings inside.