It was definitely a rat. They couldn’t actually see it, only heard it scrabbling and scratching in the bathroom ceiling.
The mother heard it first. She said nothing, hoping it would go away. She lay awake for an hour, praying for it to stop. She could see the rat clearly in her mind’s eye. It looked like the one she saw most workday mornings at the downtown garage, skittering past her feet into the storm drain.
The children heard it next. They wandered into the bathroom, one at a time, wondering if it was about to jump out at them. They could see the rat clearly in their mind’s eye. It looked like the dead one that had lain under the stairs in the courtyard for weeks before someone, a maintenance person probably, had picked it up with a shovel and put it in the dumpster.
The boyfriend heard it last, when the mother roused him from his sleep. The scrabbling and scratching had stopped for a moment then, so he told the children to go back to bed, they had all just been dreaming. But then the sound resumed. He could see the rat clearly in his mind’s eye. It looked like the ones that would sometimes run around all night inside the walls and then spring onto the roof of the rundown apartment he had once lived in.
The boyfriend rose from the mother’s bed, donned his pants, and cried, “Fetch me a screwdriver!” The children obeyed. “Fetch me a pot with a lid!” The mother obeyed.
One by one he removed the screws from the screen on the vent in the bathroom ceiling. The mother and the children hid, expecting any moment to hear him tangling with the dangerous creature. The minutes went by.
“Fetch me another screwdriver!” the boyfriend cried. “A Philips head!” The children obeyed, then hovered at a distance. The mother cowered in her room, praying for it to all be over. More minutes went by. It was more complicated, apparently, than he had thought. It always was.
Finally, there was a loud “plop,” followed by the clanging of the pot lid. The boyfriend didn’t look at what had fallen out of the vent. He didn’t have to. It was a rat all right.
“Open the front door!” he cried. The children obeyed. The mother emerged. They all stood around the doorway and watched him set the pot on the sidewalk, remove the lid, and hop back into the house.
Lo! A dove flew out of the pot. They watched it fly away until it was just a tiny dot in the sky.
Then it was out of sight.
Except in the mind’s eye.
They stood in silence. Then the mother spoke. “Who wants pancakes?”
Deborah Ross retired from her position as Professor of English at Hawaii Pacific University four years ago and began a sort of afterlife in Ashland, Oregon. This may account for the otherworldly atmosphere of her recent writings. Over the past several decades she has published academic work on narratives from Jane Austen to soap operas to Disney features, as well as creative non-fiction and short stories. A partial list of her publications may be seen here.