One day last spring my father called me.

"Hey kid. You wanna hear something really gross?"

"Uh, I don't know. Like, how gross?"

"On a scale of one to ten? Nine. Nine and a half."

"Okay. I mean, I guess..."

"Well, you know how I've been setting traps for the damn mice who keep trying to nest in my truck?"

"Yeah, you caught one?"

"Oh yeah, I've been catching about one a week."

"Wow, they love it in there! All nice and warm..."

"Yeah, well today I started up the truck and turned on the heater. And when the heater fan went on, I heard a sort of a 'thwuck' noise."

"Oh no."

"Oh yes."

"The... heater fan?"

"Yes."

"Oh GROSS! Oh that's REALLY GROSS!"

"Yeah. So I haven't been able to bring myself to take off the fan housing yet. I've had a glass of wine but I just can't do it. I have to clean it but I just can't."

"Oh Jesus. You want me to come over?"

"Would you?"

My dad lives over an hour drive away, but I have NEVER seen my dad squicked out by ANYTHING, and I was highly amused as well as morbidly curious as to what the inside of the fan housing would look like after a mouse had been pureed by a small fan blade.

It looked like mouse puree.

Except for the head, which was basically intact, and had most of the mouse hide attached to it. It looked kind of like one of those lion rugs where the head is left on it... Only with teeny tiny bloody mouse ribs.

That? Is an awesome story, Specklet.

You know that HP Lovecraft story, "The Rats In The Walls"? Have you ever actually heard rats in walls? Your walls? I have.

Wow, Last time I heard that story I was drunk, so it didn't seem so nasty!

Meanwhile, several times since this spring, when I've been out on my back porch smoking, around dusk, I've seen a biggish rat running along the gutter on the roof of my house. The roof is about 25' above ground level, so I have no idea why roof rat is there or how he got there. I suspect he is in cahoots with ceiling cat.

I didn't have any rodent problems until the spoiled prince decided to install central air. The floors in the bedrooms are hardwood and I should have left them alone instead of putting in a gray carpet. It is not a good idea to leave chocolate on the floor, but mice don't seem to care for lime. I'd put down poison before I left for Amsterdam, but they didn't touch it. I took it away--the stink of mouse excrement is bad enough without dealing with rotten corpses in the walls. I thought they'd gone, but they've come back and are not touching the glue traps.

brujita, that read like some kind of modernist poem.

In the early 90s I lived in a rat infested tenement on 13th street between 1st & 2nd in the East Village. The bells outside did not, of course, work. I was having a bunch of people from Baltimore up for Thanksgiving dinner and I was all excited because it was snowing and a holiday and all. So I went down by the steps in those days before cel phones to wait for my friends. I looked down at the trash cans by the stoop and there must have been 15 rats there, all sizes. Frolicking. In the snow. Playing little rat snow games on the trash can lids.

In that same apartment building there was a crazy Puerto Rican lady who lived downstairs. Once when I was coming in the front door she came out of her apartment with three big rats in a trap. Everyone was screaming: the lady, the three rats and me. She shook them right at my face and screamed something in fast Spanish at me and I jumped aside and then she hurled them out the front door and onto 13th Street.

Not long after that I was on the subway and these two yuppie banker type guys were dismissively discussing the anti rat posters on the train. "That's so exaggerated," one said, "Yeah," said the other one, "I've never seen rats like that in the city." I wanted to kick them. Hard.

I've answered this before, but I'm too lazy to look for it. So here's a short version or two...

Years ago, at a family reunion on my aunt's farm, myself and my cousins slept in a borrowed camper. We kept the door open because we liked the farm cats. One morning, I woke to find a dead rat in my bed - one of the farm cats had brought me a gift in the middle of the night. To "sweeten" the gift, I also found a dead mouse under a pillow I wasn't using. My aunt told me the cat must really like me.

At an apartment I shared with my mom and brother, we were bothered by mice in the kitchen. I actually watched one come up from the burner on the stove, grab a dog treat, and dash back down. So mom put down those glue traps under the stove top. I came home from work to hear pitiful squealing one day - yep, a mouse was caught. Feeling sorry for it, I took it outside, and using the eraser end of a pencil to wedge under him, I eventually peeled the mouse off the board and let him go.

I worked at an old grocery store, and we had a rat in the basement. It was so bold, that if the night crew was going down the stairs and the rat was coming up, the rat would not change direction. The employees usually did. It met it's doom once when a vendor was going down the stairs to check stock, didn't see the rat, and stepped on it.