Graymalkin's Journal

Tails of Rats: Another Comp class essay...

Sat, 19 May 2007 05:22:48 GMT

True story here, I wrote it for my composition class about a year ago, got bored and figured I'd share. It's funny if nothing else. I got a 92 on it!

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Tails of Rats
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I don’t have a problem with rodents, when I was five there was one living under my dads wood pile and the only thing that bothered me about it was that the wood pile was on the side of the house, my favorite place to play, and my mom wouldn’t let me go out there until my dad got rid of it. He did, he invented a new game of golf using the rat as a ball.
Over the next eleven years of my life I encountered many more rats, you don’t move house an average of once a year without occasionally having to deal with the local wildlife. I recall a rather memorable incident involving my cat and a rat-although that might have been a mouse or a squirrel, couldn’t really tell at that point-but that’s another story.

When I was around sixteen we finally settled into a house that was really ours and not some rental, it was nice but, surprise, surprise, the house came with rats. At first we thought it was a mouse that was getting into the bread so my mom set out a mouse-trap. However, when we got up in the morning, the trap was gone, whatever had caught itself in it, had carried the trap off with it. That was no mouse. My mom refused to put out rat traps in the house for fear of our dogs getting caught in them-a mouse trap might pinch them a bit but a rat trap would break their paw- so my dad put traps up in the attic. It didn’t work. I suggested that perhaps the rat could smell my dad scent on the traps and so refused to come near them.
Nobody really cared about my opinion. Whatever was done about the rat would have to be done soon because rats upset my mom, and never having any un-chewed bread upset everyone else. So my dad took down the traps and put poison up in the attic, For some time this seemed not to work. My dad grew impatient and bought himself a BB gun. In the early mornings he would sit with it trained on the bowl of dog food on the dining room floor-as the rat apparently had a liking for dog food-my brothers dog, Smokey, would sit beside him and stare at the bowl as well, hoping for a glimpse of the rat so he could chase it. Dad missed many a shot because of him.

Finally the rat had apparently moved out and my family had several rat-free days (complete with un-chewed bread!) And I had several days of nobody screaming;
"Rat!" Mom would scream
"Honey! Get the gun!" Dad would yell (he meant the BB gun of course)
And I would get the gun all the while wondering why I was bothering as the rat was always gone before mom had time to shriek (But again, no one cared about my opinion). Anyway, I digress.

During these blissfully rat-free days mom began to notice a disturbing smell in the kitchen and upon investigating noticed an odd string-like object hanging out of a crack in the ceiling. Unable to identify it, she finally asked my opinion;
"Honey," She asked, "What do you think that is."
"Well," I replied, scrutinizing the object. "Its a rat tail, there’s a dead rat up there."

My mom was not about to stand for that so she told my dad he would have to do something about it, they couldn’t just leave it hanging there. My dad did something all right, he took a chisel, chopped the tail off, and tossed it in the trash (This put me in mind of a demented version of the nursery rhyme ‘Three Blind Mice’ but I wisely kept this opinion to myself). While that had taken care of the problem of the hanging rat tail, -and had given us all a good laugh besides- it did nothing for the smell. Mom went to plan ‘B’, asking my brother, Bobby, for help.

So Bobby climbed up into the attic, armed with rubber gloves, the dustpan, a trash bag, and a can of bug spray (the dead rat was apparently a delicacy among the insect population).
"Okay, I found it," Bobby shouted down where Mom and I waited.
He was quiet for awhile then said; "There’s something up here looking at me! Get the gun!" (He and Dad are a lot more alike then they’d care to admit, But I also keep this opinion to myself)
Well, I got the BB gun and handed it up to him. Mom and I waited to hear the shot, then Bobby said;
"Never mind, it’s just the insulation." (Of course, everybody knows how much insulation looks like an eye)
After a few more minutes we heard Bobby spraying the bugs pray and he says;
"Okay, I killed the bugs." Pause. "Killed the insulation too." (Have to watch out for that insulation after all, vicious stuff).

Well, Bobby bagged up the rat and handed it down to me. I wondered aloud if perhaps we shouldn’t lock Smokey up somewhere before I carried the rat out to the trash as Smokey hates anything that isn’t human or canine but Mom, fairly nauseated, said;
"Just get that thing out of here!"
I did what she said and, sure enough, as I passed though the living room on my way to the front door Smokey caught scent of the rat. His nostrils flared. His eyes got huge. His ears went forward. He was off the floor and across the room in three seconds flat. He began to leap at the bag and I even though I held it up as high as I could he got his teeth in it anyway and tore it.

The dead rat flopped out onto the living room floor. Mom shrieked, Bobby nearly fell over from laughing, and I dragged the dog out on the porch to prevent him from eating the rat then promptly sat down as I was laughing too hard for my legs to support me.

Bobby scooped the rat up in the dustpan and carried it out t the trash that way, Mom sprayed disinfectant on the carpet and I unloaded the BB gun and put it away for what we hoped would be a long time.

A few months later an opossum moved into the stove.

Composition class essay-The Summer of '96; The Rock Incident

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 01:55:59 GMT

Here's an essay I had to do for my Comp. class. It's basically a story about what we refer to as 'The Rock Incident' and how stupid me and my friends were when we were kids.

The Summer of ‘96
The Rock Incident

We called it ‘The Rock Incident.’ Just like that, capitals and everything. It was the most illegal night of my life even though the whole thing wasn’t precisely my fault (I didn’t start it but I didn’t stop it either so I guess some of the blame’s mine). Anyway, the statute of limitations is up so I can share the story now without getting myself or anybody else in trouble.

It was the summer of 1996, the summer I turned eleven. My dad was in jail- I’m still not quite clear on the ‘why’ how does someone get arrested for stealing their own car anyway? For that matter, how does someone steal their own car in the first place?- and my mom, my sister Kelly and I were living in one side of a two bedroom duplex with six other people and three dogs. Old Joe and his dog Duke shared one bedroom, ‘Mover’ Mike slept on the couch. Mom, Kelly and me were in the other bedroom, along with Mom’s friend Sharon and her three kids; Christine, Michael and PJ. Boo-Boo and Buddy, our two dogs, also slept in the room with us.

My Mom’s great, even if I didn’t know it at the time, she always did the best she could with what she had. She made sure us kids were fed, went to school, and one way or another had a roof over our heads, even the kids that weren’t hers like Sharon’s kids. A lot of the time Sharon was like a big kid herself (I love her like an Aunt/big sister but it’s the truth). Sharon was in a long term on/off, live-in relationship with a guy named Steven and whenever she messed up and ‘got the boot’ as we termed it, she and her kids would crash with us for awhile. In fact I think that summer was the first time they stayed with us and started the trend.

Christine was the oldest of Sharon’s kids, about a year younger then me, and had the bossy older sister attitude to go with it. Christine was all-girl, loved makeup and dressing up, wanted to experiment with shaving her legs and liked to chase boys in her own pre-pubescent way. Me, I was still somewhat convinced that ‘boy’ was some sort of contagious disease and I should stay far away from anyone afflicted with it. With examples like Tommy and Corey who could blame me? More on them later. Michael was nine then, and if his sister was all-girl, he was all-boy, rambunctious, high-strung and kind of a brat. PJ was seven and tried valiantly to keep up with the rest of us, usually by imitating whatever Michael did. I don’t remember seeing a lot of my sister Kelly that summer, she was seventeen and had a license, need I say more?

Mom had three other friends besides Sharon. Cathy had been her best friend for years by that point, she’s was someone you could run to when you just needed a hug and a smile for no reason at all. Colleen was a bossy gossip and Brenda was boisterous, that’s about all I remember about those two. Anyway, that summer the five of them, Mom, Sharon, Cathy, Colleen and Brenda often got together to hang out. That left us kids, as well as Cathy’s youngest daughter and Colleen and Brenda’s boys to amuse ourselves.

Cathy’s daughter Rita was about a year and a half younger then me and she was my best friend. Sometimes she was a lot like Christine, all-girl, and sometimes she was a complete tomboy. I never knew what to expect from her, I don’t think anyone did. Brenda had three sons, Ben who was about thirteen that summer and therefore too old to be seen with us ’little kids’, Matt was the youngest, I think six, he mostly hung out with PJ. Josh was my age, a nice enough kid but he tended to follow whoever was in charge. The one’s in charge were Colleen’s boys Tommy and Corey. Corey was my age and Tommy a year older. Half spoiled and half neglected, their mom refused to hear a bad word about them and they ran wild. Some of my worst memories from that part of my life involve them at the forefront.

So there we were, Christine, Michael, PJ, Rita, Josh, Matt, Tommy, Corey and me. Nine kids, out of the eye sight of adults. Most of us were on the brink of puberty, we ran the neighborhood-at least in our eyes- and we were going to live forever. One night, we were bored.

I can’t remember how it started, I think someone picked up a rock and chucked it into the road just to hear the noise it made. Then a car went by and Corey threw a rock at that, he missed but that opened up a free-for-all. A new game, throwing rocks at cars. I didn’t throw any myself only because I knew I couldn’t aim and had a very short range, having no desire to make a fool of myself, I kept score for the others.

This went on for awhile, but no one could actually hit a car, Tommy and Corey were getting bored with the lack of results. They found a large rock, roughly the size of a cinderblock, and put it in the middle of the road. Then we waited, it didn’t take long. I can still remember this part clear as day.

The car was black, it was going way over the speed limit. The right front tire hit the rock, the car bounced and the tire shredded. It came back down, it skidded, briefly it went up on the left two wheels before righting itself. The taillights looked like two huge, angry red eyes in the dark. They were so bright that when I closed my eyes for a second I could still see them. The car finally came to a stop far up the street, skidding off the road and onto a neighbors front lawn, very nearly going through the living room wall of the home where some friends of mine lived. The driver got out, us kids scattered.

Most of the others headed for the backyard, probably to cross the field and hide on the cul-de-sac behind my house. I hid in my garage, Corey followed me. The garage door was open and facing the street, we watched as the cop car went by. The garage was crowded with stuff, there was a stack of books, Corey grabbed one and shoved another in my hands before flopping down on an old sofa and hissing at me to act natural. It was the only time Corey ever acted at all nice to me, -I thought I had walked into the Twilight Zone- he even told me it’d be all right. I sat on the other end of the sofa and opened the book to a random page just before the police officer looked in on us.

We were both still breathing hard from running and my book was upside down, had we been older I’m pretty sure the cop would have gotten the wrong impression. As it was, I think he got the right one. A car goes skidding by on two wheels, nearly cashes into a neighbors house and two eleven year olds aren’t at all interested? That was the night I learned I was surprisingly good at lying with a straight face. We didn’t give anything away and I guess they couldn’t prove it. The cop left, our parents never knew about any of it.

Back then it didn’t seem like such a big deal, we got away with it, and no one got hurt, not really. Looking back I think how stupid we were, that car could have flipped over, it could have hit another car, it was only luck that there weren’t any others around, it could have gone through the neighbors house and possibly killed someone. I guess I learned to think twice about what I did and what the consequences might be.

The End