This is the door that was sprayed by the cat that didn’t eat the rat who may or may not have run away when The Man started shooting a pellet gun at him.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Friday night was a fairly typical one for me. It was about 11 p.m. and I was trying to go to sleep and I heard a noise that Dad, Interrupted and I had been hearing for about a week….like something was dragging along the outside wall of our ground-floor bedroom.

I figured it was The Feral Cat, the one that has been spraying my front door for quite a while now and whose demise I am plotting on a daily basis. I mean, that door took a long time to paint and I love my brass kickplate and that damned cat is spraying all over it. (Did you know they make motion sensor sprinklers? I hope Santa brings me one.)

We don’t know for sure that it’s The Feral Cat dragging along the wall, because we snapped alert when we heard the noise and DI started snoring again and only grudgingly went to investigate when I cried, “Are you going to just let that GO? It sounds like someone’s dragging a body along the house!”

Sidebar: I don’t get this; he grouses about how women don’t need men anymore and it’s killing the nuclear family and society and then when I really do need him he doesn’t want to go out in the cold and see who is dragging a body along the house. Sheesh. (I make a joke here: he is perfectly aware that I need him, especially when I have to parallel park.)

He found no body, and no Feral Cat. And we went to sleep.

Friday night, however, I was trying to doze off and heard a new noise: a scratching that seemed to emanate from outside the wall behind our headboard. I was reduced to banging on the wall and yelling, “Cut it out!” as if Feral Cat had brought home a girlfriend and was doing something loud and nasty in the next apartment.

Feral Cat, notably, did not care.

DI was out in the Man Cave in the garage (similar to the Bat Cave, only it’s with a Honda Accord, not the Batmobile and there’s a fridge full of beer and a TV; he’s the envy of the entire male population of the neighborhood, if not Batman himself) watching a bad movie and he offered to go see at the commercial break.

And see he did. He came into the bedroom to announce happily and hilariously that we had a marsupial in the backyard.

Now, I know I’m sleepy but honey are you sure we have a kangaroo out there?

Ah. Make that a rodent. A rat. He indicates a size that, if I had been confronted with this when I took out the garbage, would have made me squeal like (I hate to say it, given recent posts, but yes) A GIRL. And flee the house forever. Which would have been useless because every house in our desert town has been combating these damned things for ten years to the point where the damned rats have been staging Rockette dance numbers on the block walls surrounding our neighbors’ relatively-upscale yards while they run after the ubiquitous citrus trees and we’ve just been lucky or clueless, take your pick.

So last night, I was visiting friends and DI kept texting me to tell me that he was happy as a clam, sitting in the door to the Man Cave with his pellet gun and a beer and taking pot shots at The Rat.

The Rat may have fled, screaming (he probably went home to his rat-wife and told her about The Man who found him and indicated a size with his hands that made HER squeal like a girl), either because of the pellet gun or the ultrasonic devices I plugged into outlets all over the house.

Our descent into White Trash is now complete. I’m gonna park a car in the front yard right next to a discarded toilet and call it a day.

© E.S. Evans 2010