Ahhhh... Finally I'm home again after a long vacation. Aside from some small pasalubongs, I've brought home with me loads of laundry and soiled clothes inside my luggage. If the customs officers at the airport insisted on opening up my luggage, they would have suspected that I'm running an "ukay-ukay" business here, hehehe.
Having rushed up in packing my things before the vacation (it took me only 30 minutes to pack up, rushing to catch the 7AM Philtranco Bus at the back of SM Megamall), it's not a surprise that I arrived home to an unkempt house with things strewn about here and there. So I tidied up the place, loaded some laundry into the washing machine, put it in auto-mode, and then went on to sleep for the night.
I woke up in the morning and the machine had already finished its wash job. I hang up the clothes to air dry and put in another washload of laundry. I checked on the laundry 20 minutes later and as I looked down on the floor, I saw an itsy bitsy small creature looking at me, as big as my nose if it has a pimple, its soft fur standing on edge and its whiskers moving about as it raised its nose trying to catch my smell. As I looked at it closely, I realized...
IT'S A MOUSE!
Oh no! There's a mouse in my house!
It didn't run when I tried to scare it away. I even stamped my feet close to it but it didn't even budge an inch, like it was too weak to move. Hmmm, that's strange, I thought. Maybe it almost drowned from the wash water that's why it couldn't move... But it's fur was very dry so it couldn't have.
I still couldn't figure out why the creature wasn't scared of me, so I took my trusty metal pliers and grabbed it by its tail. It cried out in protest and gave an "IK-IK-IK-IK" sound as I pulled it up by its tail but it was too weak to move and defend itself. As I looked at it up close, I realized that it wasn't a mouse at all. It looked like a mouse but it also looked like a baby from the way it cried in pain. Oh no! It's actually a BABY RAT! It must have fallen from the ceiling or from the rooftop where the rat nest was. It's a BIG BABY RAT! And it's going to be a BIGGER RAT if I let it go, so I had to get rid of it quickly.
(Warning! If you're scared of rats or if you are an animal rights activist, stop reading right here!)
I quickly took a plastic bag, put the baby mouse in it, sealed the plastic bag shut, put the plastic bag inside an empty pork-and-beans tin can, sealed the can shut, put the can inside another plastic bag, and finally sealed the plastic bag shut. I could still hear the baby rat crying out "IK-IK-IK" and so I quickly drove over to a garbage dump in an adjacent town and put the plastic bag on top of the garbage heap so that it would be exposed to the heat of the sun. Hopefully the baby rat will become toast before the day is over.
Poor rat, tsk tsk tsk.
Was I cruel to the rat? In that past, I've burned hairy caterpillars to death and sliced them open so that their green slime would ooze out (ewww). I've also salted many many earthworms to death, watching them wriggle in pain as I sprinkle salt on their bare skin, finally picking them up and dropping them beside an ant trail so that the ants would devour the helpless earthworm. I have even dissected several frogs in my high school biology class and made soccer balls of them with my dormmates when we didn't have soccer balls to play with in the field... Boy, was I bad! So that does it, now I know I really can't be a Buddhist.
Anyway, as I was about to leave the garbage dump, I again put my hands in front of my chest and said out loud... "Sawasdee Rat!"
DISCLAIMER (to protect myself from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals): The story depicted above is purely fictional work. Any similarities to names, events and places is purely coincidental and do not depict any real event.
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