By David Himmel

Walking the dog at night is always a little fraught. There are two stretches of the two block route I call Rats Run Way. They border the route north and south. I’m not afraid of rats, but they have this tendency to startle the living shit out of me. They’ll bolt from the bushes of the apartment building or from the dumpsters behind the 7-Eleven strip mall at the corner of our street and Milwaukee Avenue. I’ll jump and try not to yelp. Molly will yank my arm trying to catch them. Sometimes, they’re not running, but lie dead on the darkest part of the sidewalk. 

I don’t like our neighborhood rats. They’re worse than the gutter punks. For six years, I’ve been fighting with the nasty rodents living in our alley and under the foundation of our three-flat apartment building. Dead or alive, there’s often a rat of some kind I have to face. The dead ones make me happy. Especially when I find them flattened in the street—turned into bio pavement by a car I assume came from heaven. The idea of killing rats is one of my go-to fantasies. I daydream of shooting them with my air rifle that is way too powerful to wield in the city, or having the mutant powers of Magneto and mashing them to death when they scurry under the wire mesh along the edges of our yard. With a wink I could make the wire mesh wrap around the rat and constrict until the rodent squished through the mesh like a Play-Doh action set. Sometimes, I’ll take a one dead from the poison boxes on the perimeter of our property and shovel it back down one of the big holes from whence it came. I think of it as a message to the other rats. “Don’t show your rat mugs around here or this will happen to all of you.” It’s very mafioso of me. And, perhaps, sadistic. But they’re rats so fuck them.

Hunting rats and my desire to kill them was the first topic of conversation my wife and I had when we met. She said I should not have been walking the alley behind my apartment with a small bb gun shooting at them because they had a right to be there. She wasn’t wrong. But neither was I. Fuck rats. Kill them all.

So imagine my excitement when Molly and I walked upon a big shit of a rat on South Rats Run Way. Right there in the middle of the sidewalk alongside the 7-Eleven. Molly and I paused. Looked at each other. Looked at the rat. It looked dead. Lying there under the bright streetlight. But it wasn’t dead. It was dying. We could see its stupid little chest rising and falling with no discernible rhythm. It’s beady eyes looked at us with fear and disdain.

“Gross,” I said to Molly as we crossed the street away from it.

She did her business at the corner then pulled me back to the dying rat making sure to leave plenty of distance between us and it.

 “Let’s kill it,” I said. “Is there a big rock around here? We can smash its head in.” I surveyed the area; nothing. “Okay. Let’s go home. I’ll get the shovel.”

✶

Molly and I returned to our apartment, me with the energy of a man on a mission. I unhooked her harness to let her run free to my wife Katie who was watching a PBS cooking show on her iPad in bed. I hung up Molly’s leash and harness and joined them in the bedroom.

“There’s a big rat dying on the sidewalk by 7-Eleven,” I told Katie with a grin on my face and a lilt in my voice.

“Ew.”

“I’m gonna go kill it.” And I turned to head down to the building’s basement where my rat shovel leans against the back stairwell waiting patiently like Excalibur waits in the stone for Arthur to give it a yank. The rat shovel is no ordinary shovel. It’s an instrument of precision and germs. It used to be a snow shovel. But in 2014, we experienced the Summer of the Rat where our yard was overrun with rats thanks to a healthy nest thriving alongside the foundation. The downstairs neighbors and I took it upon ourselves to fight the vermin. We set snap traps baited with almonds smothered in peanut butter. Five out of seven days a week, I’d find at least one dead rat with its head or neck snapped by the trap or traps in the morning when I would take our dog Eddie out for his morning pee ’n poo. I used the snow shovel to scoop them up and toss them into plastic bags to dump in the trash.

“You’re not going to kill it. Just leave it,” Katie said.

“There’s a potentially dangerous animal likely full of poison and God knows what other filth, plopped in the center of a major neighborhood thoroughfare like a sleeping Jabba the Hut. I’m going to finish the thing off then chuck it in the dumpster. It’s my neighborly duty.”

“That’s disgusting. Someone else will get it.”

“If everyone thought that way, nothing would get done.”

“Good thing not everyone thinks that way.”

Katie is my wife, not my boss. But I could tell she was really bothered by the idea that I was giddy at the prospect of going out to violently slaughter a rat with a snow shovel.

“What if someone sees you?” she asked me.

“Let them.”

“They’ll probably call the cops on you.”

It was late. I was tired. She didn’t convince me to stay in as much as I just gave up on it. “Fine,” I said, “Should we get high and watch 30 Rock for the seven hundredth time?” She liked that idea.

✶

The next morning, I took Molly for her walk as per usual. The rat was gone. No sign of blood. No sign of anything horrific happening to it. No sign of a dead rat body in the nearby bushes or flattened in the middle of the street. I thought, someone must’ve scooped it up either after killing it or after finding it dead from the poison, or whatever was killing it.

I don’t often experience FOMO. The feeling I had that morning as Molly and I walked down the Rats Run Way South wasn’t a fear of missing out, it was regret for missing out. I wanted that rat’s blood on my hands. Or, more precisely, I wanted that rat’s blood on my shovel.

Never again will I miss an opportunity like that. Fucking rats…