Rats in the Refrigerator

 

   Most people, when they say that they do have a rodent population in their refrigerator, are troubled by them gnawing at cables and getting stuck in the cooling fans and such. I’ve heard it creates quite a smell.  A friend of mine had a series of chest freezers go offline once in the summer, unfortunately, they were full of dead emus being stored for “further use”. He didn’t find out that the freezers had blown the circuit breaker for a few days, after all, how often do you check on frozen emus?  The  odor was indeed astounding, I am sure that he had vultures circling his house for a long time after opening the first one.

  In our house, our cold rodents are much more of even temper, since they are all dead, and stored in little Ziploc freezer bags, nicely arranged in even rows, like German troops in the Great War.

    When one takes care of exotic animals, such as Archimedes the owl and my wife’s python, Princess, you just get used to having the little things next to the leftovers.  The rats, of course, are kept in plain brown bags also, and most people know not to ask what is in the packages. My Great Aunt Kay, and I do mean “Great”, was the only one to open one without knowing  the contents. Great Aunt Kay sort of billowed about a house, in her bright red and yellow muumuu’s, often commenting about the lack of any spirits of decent sort in her current highball glass. She was a very high-minded lady, and used to discuss the 1920’s with a curious aplomb that often left me quite winded by just imagining the high-jinks she got into.  She was brazen and extremely honest about life, wonderful qualities in a Great Aunt, but was horrified to see, at a  modern motion picture, that the actress had “shown her knees!” Thank god she never saw any of Kubrick’s films, she would have become catatonic.  In her house in California, she had a marvelous pool with an octopus tile mural at the bottom, I keep on trying to find a photo of it, but am stuck with only the memory so far.

 Once while out visiting, she volunteered to get some chicken that needed to be thawed out for a future dinner out of the freezer in the garage, and no one thought to mention that the brown paper sacks marked “chicken” were in fact baby chicks, pullets, destined for the gullet of my Reticulated Python. My parents knew, I knew, even my girlfriend knew, that it was best to avoid opening up the bag and seeing those little faces staring straight up at you. I think she expected a fryer or something. To this day, I still think she fainted not because of the sight of baby chicks, but the thought that those were the chickens we were going to really have for dinner.  Sort of a “poor mans” game hen.