I live in a small apartment on the bottom floor of a four unit building. Recently, it's been much colder than normal. As we learned in this apartment last year, the cold and the rain drive rodents indoors.
After the New Year, which we had spent with our families, my roommate and I came back to mice shit - on the shelves of our pantry, on the counter, even on top of the refrigerator. But we weren't alarmed. We dealt with this last year. We casually agreed that we should e-mail our landlord about it. We sent a short e-mail to him, and he responded that day that he would come and bring traps tomorrow.
The next day he brought two small two-inch long traps, the kind with the bait on the end, often featured on cartoons. He baited them with chicken bits that he said he gives to his dog "you know, as a treat," because I guess he thought this would reenforce our faith in his exterminating capabilities - this bait was good shit.
We placed them where my roommate had seen the rodent the night before (these things are very bold). One of these places, importantly, was between the oven and the counter, in a tiny and filthy and dark corridor we never bothered cleaning. Our landlord pushed it in with a fly-swatter and away he went. We decided we would cook some ready-made pizzas in the oven. Inside, we found weeks old chicken my roommate had left in the oven over the break. We laughed about it, and I took it out to the trash. When we turned on the oven, the most rancid, foul, death-smell filled our tiny kitchen. We speculated that we were cooking a rat. But we rationalized that maybe it was some of that rotten chicken that was burning in there.
We went to sleep that night after turning on fans, opening the windows (and you can be sure that it was cold as fuck that night, so that smell was bad). As we slept, both traps got sprung.
In the morning, there were no mice, nor any rodent. We were discouraged. I reset the traps, hoping we had at least mortally wounded the little guy(s). My roommate left later that day to go spend some time with family. It was me alone.
Around dusk, I was at my desk working when I heard something. I didn't think much of it, but I heard it again - something was jostling around in the kitchen. I got up, walked gently to the door to the kitchen, and saw in the half-dark a long, four inch long tail. It was sprung out, balancing the invisible body of what must be a rat (right?) and not a mouse - the body was hidden by the coffee machine at the very end of the counter, right before the oven. I turned off the light, and it jumped behind my oven.
My adrenaline was running. No wonder those little dinky traps didn't work - this thing was a little monster, a furry beast. I looked behind the oven - nothing. I concluded, frustrated: he went into the oven.
I turned on the oven, smiling like some mastermind. It was a dramatic sort of death for a mouse - who was shitting everywhere. But there was no closure, or anything. I just stood there awkwardly. There was no sound from the oven, just the sound of fire going - it was no different than when we'd cooked the pizzas. I suddenly felt very evil - this was premeditated after all - but there was no going back now.
I went into the other room, since I was in the middle of something. I finished that in a matter of minutes and came into the kitchen. The SMELL! It was back!
I heard the noise of metal being disturbed - like a jostling sort of sound. I had got him. I wondered if he was still alive as he was being cooked - for some reason I envisaged your death would come before you got cooked, right? But the jostling continued.
Ten minutes later, I turned off the oven. If that jostling was the mouse, it would have been dead by then. I checked behind the oven again - no mouse. I thought - where might he have scurried into the oven? Well probably the broiler, right - the broiler that lacks a sheet? The broiler that we never use.
I knelt down and opened it up, my iPhone flashlight ready. There - a perfect shaped hole at the back for a mouse or rat. And literally carpeting the floor - charred, lightly smoking rat shit. No rat in sight.
The smell was rat shit, the sound was it exploding in the heat.
I stood up, turned on the fans in the room, and shut the door.
Good god, the smell.
TL;DR: In an effort to kill a rat, I instead broiled his shit, causing my apartment to smell like cooked rat shit, which smells exactly like you would think it does - but worse
Submitted January 05, 2015 at 11:38AM by bogimpi http://ift.tt/1Bz8MWO tifu
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