Ryan Turner

I now have twenty-nine appliances in my home. I’ve walked around counting all the things that plug in. A refrigerator, a dishwasher, a microwave, a toaster, a blender, a mixer, three clock-radios, three computers, a television, a stereo, a dehumidifier, an air purifier, a wood pellet stove, five lamps, two printers, an electric fan, a coffee maker, a DVD player, and two plug-in phones. When the power goes out – like it did one night last week – the house becomes eerily quiet. It’s a quiet I forget exists. A quiet that makes me nervous to pee at the thought that I might wake my next door neighbours.

Ten nights ago, with the snow coming down hard at 5am, a scream pierced that silence. For the past week I’d been dealing with a rat in my basement apartment. I’d set sticky traps, and the rat had kicked them across the room. I’d put down snap traps and the rat had nimbly eaten the bait without them springing. He’d gotten away with four carob chips, a piece of popcorn covered in peanut butter and a healthy chunk of havarti. On the night in question, I grabbed a flashlight and scurried downstairs. My tenant was standing in the dark with a hammer. There was a bit of blood on some paper at her feet. She whispered that the rat was in her good leather boot. If it would have been me living down there with a bleeding rat in the dark, I would have been long gone, but there she was with the hammer. I’d had nightmares about what to do with it if it ever got stuck to those traps, and now I had come to the moment of reckoning. I half-joked that if it screamed she was on her own. By this time I was wearing hockey gloves and holding an old ballhockey stick with a plastic blade. I pushed the blade down to keep the rat from coming out. I said, It’s bleeding in your boot. Do you want your boot back? And her look said definitely not. A moment passed as the two of us stood there, uncertain what came next. I had a yearning for the buzz of an appliance: the air purifier, my wood pellet stove. At the top of the stairs, out the window, I could see the white of blowing snow. I looked down at the silhouette of the boot. I couldn’t step on him. I knew I should – that it was the humane way - but I just couldn’t do it. I thought maybe if I stood there long enough the boot and the rat would burst into flames. Here is what I finally did: I got a bucket and put the boot into the bucket with the hammer and the hockey stick still pressed inside holding the boot closed. I took the boot outside in the 5:30 cold and I filled the bucket with snow. Then I got a box and put the bucket with the boot, the hammer and the hockey stick into the box. I cut a hole in the box so the hockey stick would come up through the top and I taped the box closed. The closest thing to me was a flower pot so I put that on top of the box and retreated inside to monitor my work from the window. I kept imagining him chewing through the boot, digging his way through the snow, prying open the tape but giving up at the weight of the heavy pot that it would have to topple over to escape. What if I piled snow on the pot? Or put the box into trunk of my car…. but then there was the hockey stick. If there would have been heat and noise and a bit of light, I like to think it would have all gone down another way.