The attic redux

I pulled down the stairs, gingerly made my way up, pulled the light fixture cord, looked around, and saw:



I turned to the right and saw:



I turned again and saw:



I looked a little closer to my right and saw:



and then I fled in fear like the coward that I am.

Now, you may be thinking- "that doesn't look scary", but you weren't there, so shut up!

The overriding fear comes from the high rat potential. Those who know me well are well aware that I have a bad history with rats. Even some of those people have never really heard the whole story so here goes...

When I was a teenager my mom passed away and my father was an awful drunk who was never home. Somehow our house became infested with dozens of wild rats. They were everywhere. I could hear them rummaging through my mattress when I slept. Sometimes I would have to bat them off of me in the middle of the night. My brother put out glue traps to catch them and I would come home to their struggling for life and their chewing off body parts in search of freedom. My brother would kill them with a baseball bat to put them out of their misery. Even today, if you came to my house you might wonder-"why do Vera's family photo albums and old books have such ragged edges?". It was the rats, they ate everything. Luckily, my now stepmother eventually let me come live with her and I was able to escape the rat-house.

Now, I don't have an irrational fear of rats. I actually still think they are very cool creatures. Before, and actually during, the rat infestation I had a pet rat. He was one of my closest friends, but I had to give him away because I was so freaked out by the rat-house. I

On the less traumatic side (for me anyway), I then worked at a restaurant that was infested with rats. They would run across the floor during the dinner rush. People would always ask what that rumbling in the ceiling was and I would lie and say the roof was being repaired. Our storage room was downstairs and when you walked down there, the first thing you would see in the darkness was hundreds of eyes staring at you from the shelves of food. The worst part was the smell. Glue traps were placed under the booths and when people started to complain about the smell we would know that a rotting rat sat under their bum. That was a little more difficult to try to explain. The craziest part of this story for y'all is that the health department knew all about it. They came out several times and the problem was so rampant that it was impossible to hide. So, you would assume that the restaurant would fail inspection. But no, they even received an "A" because they were addressing the problem with the ineffective rat traps.

So, when I was on the ladder (I never even made it further) and saw the clothes tumbled and covered with wood chips I knew that the rats are there. I didn't see one, I didn't hear one, but they're there.

It's like they're following me.