Last Friday, I got home from my evening out, still slightly tipsy. I immediately took off my heels, swapped them for flip flops, and stood in my doorway talking to my guy roomate for half an hour, until I heard something.
“Dude. There is something in the ceiling.”
“Are you sure it isn’t because you’ve been drinking?”
I stopped to ponder this, and then insisted, “no, it’s there. Listen.” And there it was, a scratching in the ceiling, in the living room.
Guy roomate tried to insist it was mice, but I didn’t think so. I then had to retell the story of the Beach Rat. Because when I was a baby, a GIANT RAT came into the room, one of the local beach rats that has grown to mutant size from a diet of fish and seaweed and suburban garbage. My mother knew he was a beach rat because, quote, “he had a towel and a straw hat, and was wearing a little rat-sized Hawaiian shirt.” My mother then had to stay up all night to make sure this rat didn’t chew my face off. My father insisted she was crazy, that no rat was that big, and then he found the body in a trap, and it was a foot long from nose to tail.
I’m a little weirded out about giant rodents because of that. And I know what mice sound like, as opposed to beach rats, possums, racoons and other large critters. And this wasn’t a mouse. We listened for a while longer, and began to realize – this thing could be a trapped cat for all we knew. And if it wasn’t a cat, it could be as big as one.
“Did you ever read that Stephen King story about the giant rats under the mill?” I asked. “The one in Night Shift where at the end, the guy finds the giant, two foot carnivorous rats and their queen, which is as big as a dog?”
I was totally freaked out when I fell asleep that night, afraid I was going to wake up face to face with some slavering oversized rat. Then, on Wednesday, I woke up at 5am because something was chewing through my ceiling. I could hear it. It was chewing or scratching or digging or something, and it was bigger than a mouse, and it was pretty enthusiastic about it.
This article doesn’t make me feel any better:
http://news.sympatico.msn.ca/OddNews/ContentPosting.aspx?contentid=917ff8647db6415d898144cf20fd76b3&show=False&number=0&showbyline=True&subtitle=&detect=&abc=abc
See, now THIS is why we’re moving.
Jillian's Blog 
Giant rats, while unnerving, I can deal with; giant centipedes, however, would have me screaming like a little girl.
Ask the Russian Army soldier who broke into my room when I was in college because he heard me screaming (he thought I was being assaulted), only to find me standing on a chair and screaming because a centipede had just gone and bumped into my bare foot while I was sitting at my desk, in the dark, writing a paper on my computer.
*ew*
Good luck with the move, btw. It sounds like it was a good decision!
i think you should find it.
and hold it.
and hug it.
and call it george.