What I wish I didn’t hear

“Skitter, skitter, tick, tick.  Skitter, skitter, tick, tick.” 

You guessed it.  We have a new resident.  Mr. Schrock has reported two sightings, one in our bedroom and one in the living room.

I have a dark and terrible history with his kind.  The first painful incident was chronicled in this column from the archives entitled “I’m going bugs over here.”  I can still feel the scrabbling of tiny claws on my leg.  Ewww!

In the dark of the night as I lay in my bed, I hear him, running through the walls and skittering around overhead.  And I wish very bad things for him.

There was a visit from his predecessor one Christmas Eve at our old house as we slumbered – again – in sleeping bags on the floor around the Christmas tree.  We were prepared that time around, having set a trap with a tasty morsel in the broom closet.  I was awakened from my holiday dreams by a ghastly thumping and banging.  Rousing my in-house rodent removal technician, he stuck his head, bleary-eyed, into the closet, and there he was…caught, but alive and thrashing. 

Unable to look, I burrowed under the covers as The Mister scraped him into a bucket and set him outside in the freezing dark to go night-night.  For good.

It’s not freezing yet, so I implore Mr. Schrock to get a trap and make it die!  It’s time he goes “into that good night.”  I’m ready to hear silence again.