They continue their assault of the attic quarters. They remain quiet during the day, but sometimes I can hear them scuttle back and forth, their little claws scraping the thin surface above. How did they get in there? Up the trees? Across to the roof maybe? In through the cracks? What is it to be a rat? What is pleasure? What is pain? What is his end in life? To reach the promised roof? To sack it and loot its many edible treasures?
I fear the scrapes and shuffles sure, but what I fear even more than that is the snap of a trap, and the thudding of a struggling body. And then silence. Yes, there are traps set up there. Right above my room. Beautiful.
Humans can't co-exist with rats. There is too much destruction. But I hate to know anything is dying right now. Maybe that's partly why I don't watch the news. Or maybe its why I leave spiders to their own devices, even when they give me the creeps, or why I let the ants go about their business in those little ordered lines of theirs, or why I save bees and beetles and flys from drowning in our pool. Why the insects? The creatures no one cares about? The creatures we naturally loathe...for some reason? Perhaps my shell is still a few degrees too soft. And what will happen when something else that is truly important to me dies? What then? I try not to think about it.
I finally got around to cleaning the dust off of my ceiling-fan blades. Have you seen those things? The older ones? That dust just piles up on there; the blades grab it right out of the air and it just sticks. I kept looking up and seeing that dust, and I kept doing nothing about it...
