rude awakening

"Hey, hey, wake up. Wake up."

"Hmmm... what," he croaked, rolling over to look in my direction through the darkness.

"I hear something. Don't you hear that?"

"I was asleep, so no." He jerked the sheets I'd stolen back to his side of the bed.

"Well listen."

Nothing but quiet

"To what?"

"Just LISTEN."

Quiet... and then, faintly...

munch... munch munch crunch

"See!?"

"What is that?"

"I don't know, that's why I woke you up!"

He sighed as he rolled away from me and placed his feet on the floor on his side of the bed. He was lucky he had a his-side. I had the cold yellow wall against me in this cramped half-studio flat. He stood slowly as he snapped on his bedside lamp, and the crunch munch suddenly stopped.

"Turn it off, it went away," I whispered.

He clicked the light off, and in bare feet he crept over to the doorway, standing and waiting in the dark for the crinkling to start again. I could see the outline of his tense body in the white street light streaming in from one of our two windows. He stood and stared at nothing, leaning slightly forward, focusing all his energy on listening.

Crunch...

He slid slowly and silently the two steps through our tiny living room to the kitchen doorway.

Munch munch crunch

I rose out of the bed and moved to where I could see him, what little I could see in the dark, into the arched doorway of the bedroom. The bare floorboards were cold under my feet, and I hugged myself against the chill and my anxiety.

"What is it?" I whispered as quietly as I could.

He slowly reached over to his left, his long, naked arm shining bright in the street lamp's light, and snapped on the kitchen light.

"Shit!!"

He jumped straight up, turned, and high-stepped back into the living room, his face contorted in horror and disgust, hands clutching at his shirt. And then I saw it, the little brown furry creature, scurrying towards him.

I've never felt myself move so fast. Before I could even think, before recognition of what this was had even popped into my head, I had jumped into the air and perched on the end of the bed, clutching the bottom of my short cotton nightshirt, dancing around from foot to foot like a frightened little girl, kicking sheets. I finally peeked around the doorway trying to see what became of my cornered husband.

"Where'd it go, where'd it go??" he was yelling, looking all around his feet, spinning in a little circle.

"I think it stayed in the kitchen, I don't think it followed you," I told him, holding onto the wall from my perch on the bed, leaning around the archway to look at him.

"Ok, ok, we need a barrier. Here." He snatched my long, narrow dressing mirror off the wall and shoved it against the frame of the kitchen door on its side, then put a couple large books on one side and the London phone book on the other to prop it up.

"Where'd it go? Well, that's what the crunch was," he said, a bit calmer now, as he leaned over the mirror and pointed to the bag of trash in the corner by the front door. There was a small hole chewed into the bottom of the black plastic, and some food scraps had fallen out onto the floor.

"I put it over there because I wanted to take it out when I left for work in the morning. It's so cold outside, and I already had my shoes off so I didn't take it out earlier. I don't see him anywhere.... Look," he said as he pointed at the kitchen floor, "there's a hole where that pipe goes under the stove. I bet he went down in there."

"Well stick something over it so it can't come back up!" I yelled as I finally hopped down off the end of the bed, curling my toes under my feet to try to keep as much of me off the rodent-ridden floor as possible.

Stepping very gently over the barrier, pausing with foot in mid-air to look all around before putting it down, he reached and grabbed a plastic Sainsbury grocery bag from the counter and shoved it into the hole, then quickly jumped back over the mirror.

"Let me get some shoes and I'll take the garbage out," he sighed as he walked to the closet part of our bedroom and grabbed his tennis shoes, taking care to stuff his pajama pant legs into the shoes. "I'm not taking any chances of that thing jumping on me."

When he was back from taking out the trash, we stood on our side of the divide, staring at the kitchen floor, watching for any movement.

"I think it's gone now."

We turned off the kitchen lights and found ourselves still standing and staring into the darkness, listening for tiny scurrying movements. When the silence persisted long enough to put our minds at least a bit more at ease, we returned to bed. Fairly quickly he began his slow, quiet snore, but for the rest of the night I laid and listened, hearing nothing but his breathing, the muffled street noise, and the scratching of my thoughts inside my sleepy brain.