I smell a rat

The long suffering old lady smelled something unpleasant in a corner of the kitchen and one whiff told me of course it was a dead rat. No mistaking that smell.

Or, more precisely, a motherfucking dead rat. I hate these fucking things. And, I must say, I hate that it falls to me to have to be the one to deal with them. But I am the dude in the house, which means I kills them and I gets to cut open the walls to take out their got-damn stinking corpses.

Allow me to note that I removed said rat while the old lady was in New Orleans. She smelled it and then left town for five days. You get the split screen effect-- one person happily sitting in the sun eating a fried oyster po boy, the more downtrodden person removing a dead rat from a wall while it rains outside...

The temperature plunged and that seems to have encourage rodents to move into the living area, otherwise known as the killing zone. Mother Maybelle and I had scared up a rodent the week before in the boiler room, she chased it and the thing moved so fast I couldn't be sure what it was. I told the old lady a mouse but of course that was bullshit because mice and little and cute and anything of any size is a fucking rat. Rat! It is one thing to have them in garage, where I kill them in a lackidasical fashion, but in the house I must adopt a zero tolerance policy and kill everything that moves, twice, generation to generation and onto their children's children.

So I invested in some of the higher strength rat poison, can't even remember the name, raptor or razor or something. The A list stuff, about twice as much as the other shit that promises to kill thing. It definitely worked because it killed this bastard almost overnight and he was fucking big.

I tried to pick him up with chopsticks but he was too damn heavy, so it had to be pliers. His body was longer than a chopstick and with his tail he was longer than two chopsticks.

The whole time I was doing this I was thinking "Motherfucker! Motherfucker!" I hate doing this.

Anyway, the rat is long gone, along with the smell, and the wall is all fixed now. This spot is, perfectly enough, directly below the area where the kitchen ceiling came down last fall, so once the new roof is on in three days time (or so goes the current plan) I will fix the ceiling and never have to deal with it again until another fucking rat expires behind the wall.