Things that go kathunk in the night

Kate’s post on why she’s too good for most men is just too funny. The comment thread is priceless, especially my comments, which speak volumes towards why I am too good for most women. Kate, I thought about writing my version of this post, but it kept coming out serious. Being too good . . . well, let’s just say it’s my curse.

And here’s proof.

***

Late last night, we watched the end of Wait Until Dark, a movie which proves Hollywood has been and forever will be* silly. I’m talking Snakes on a Plane silly. If they remade Wait Until Dark today, Samuel L. Jackson would be the cop who storms in at the end, ranting about motherfucking drugs in a motherfucking doll. My favorite part: baddy Alan Arkin (looking incredibly young) douses Audrey Hepburn’s apartment with gasoline to, um, terrorize her. And then for the next fifteen minutes Arkin and Hepburn take turns lighting matches to scare each other.

People. I’ve worked in a burn ward. DO NOT MIX GASOLINE AND MATCHES, ‘kay?

And then there’s the darkness. Audrey Hepburn is blind, so to help the viewers empathize with her horror, much of the climax is shot in the dark. Oy.

Afterwards, we turned out the lights to go to sleep and heard a massive kathunk from the roof.

“Do you suppose one of our errant cats has returned?” I said.

KATHUNK!

“That’s no cat,” said Karen. “Mountain lion maybe, but not a cat. Maybe it’s a bear.”

“A bear?” Thinking: Motherfuckin’ bears on my motherfuckin’ roof!

“Sure. Bears climb.”

“Where’s the damned flashlight?”

I found the BFF** and shined it out the window. I can’t see all of our roof, but I can see most of it, and no bear, no mountain lion.

Clad only in my new leopard-spotted bikini undies and brilliant yellow frog shirt, I went outside to check out the rest of the roof. Nothing. No bear, no mountain lion, not even a raccoon. I went back to bed.

“That was pretty brave of me,” I said. “That bear could have mauled me.”

“Mm-hm.”

“Yup, I’d say that’s deserving of some sort of reward.”

KATHUNK.

“It’s coming from the attic,” Karen said.

We have access to our attic from our little walk-in closet. There’s a tall steel ladder all set up and ready to go, since the guys who worked on our house needed to get up there and I’ve been too lazy to move it anywhere. I took the BFF, lifted aside the wooden cover, stuck the light and my head up there and

KATHUNK!

I’m not sure what happened next. All I know is, I was off the ladder and on my ass with a broken flashlight at my side. Something had moved in the attic, and I must have hit the flashlight against a rafter because the light cut out and it was dark and THERE WERE MOTHERFUCKIN’ SNAKES IN MY MOTHERFUCKIN’ ATTIC . . .

“You okay?”

“I just fell off a ladder.” Only I growled it. “But, yes, I’m okay. There’s something up there. Bats, maybe?”

I remembered hearing a squeaking noise.

“Could be.”

I found another flashlight and crept up the ladder for another look. Much more careful this time.

Okay, folks: if you have a soft spot in your heart for mice, read no further, because that’s what was making the racket. One mouse. He’d caught his tail in a mousetrap our workers set out. I know they must have done it because I gave up on mousetraps a long time ago. Peanut butter would disappear and the traps would remain behind, unsprung, a visual taunt proving the intellectual superiority of Mus musculus.

Not only that, but the workers had done something unusual. They nailed the trap to a length of four-by-four. The mouse flung his body back and forth trying to escape, and he had enough strength to wield that wood like a club. Hence the kathunk.

I handed wood + trap + hapless rodent down to Karen.

“You’ll have to kill it,” she said. “It’s not just his tail that’s caught. His back leg is broken, too.”

And an ugly injury at that. Time for a mercy killing, which I won’t detail here. Let’s just say he didn’t suffer long.

After I threw everything out, I came back upstairs.

“That was pretty brave of me,” I said. “That mouse could have mauled me.”

But even that spectacular show of courage didn’t faze Karen. Sigh.

D.

* Has been and forever will be: sorry, still in Star Trek mode.

** BFF: big fuckin’ flashlight. What did you think BFF meant?