(1 min read)
We’ve had rats. It’s been an adventure. I’ll leave it at that.
Anyone who’s had rats knows that scratching sound in the walls, a tiny little noise that makes you want to open up the wall with an ax or burn the whole friggin’ house down.
This past week, I’ve been hearing that scratching sound in the wall behind my computer.
Crap.
I know what happens from here. I have put on clothes I don’t care about along with some disposable rubber gloves. I have to climb into the attic and into the cobwebby crawlspaces under the house, to set the traps, hoping to God the rat chooses to die in the traps and not in the walls. I have to wage a war.
It’s a sting operation and it will be on my mind for weeks as if the scratching is in my head and not in the wall.
I find myself sitting here writing and in between keystrokes I can hear the scratching. I yell at the wall, knock on it, kick it, but it keeps happening. I haven’t told anyone else in the house about the scratching because I don’t want to ruin their week too. I’d rather just keep the scratching in my head.
It wasn’t until today that I decided to put my ear to the wall to see if I could pinpoint the exact location of the little bugger, locate the nest and maybe, just maybe, put a hammer through the sheet rock.
It wasn’t until today, after I stopped the shouting and the kicking and the hammer-plotting, that I made some room for curiosity and noticed that the scratching wasn’t in the wall after all.
It wasn’t in my head either.
And it wasn’t even a scratching. It was a crackling, an oscillating, in-and-out crackle in my 15-year old desktop speaker, perched upright next to my monitor.
Glad I didn’t use the hammer.