My Book of Rats

" I was in my bedroom—I had two roommates at the time, but they were both out for the evening—and I heard a noise in the bathroom.  Sort of a rustle-around kind of noise, so I got up and peered into the bathroom, looked all around, and that's when I saw the giant rat running around inside the bathtub.  I screamed like a girl and closed the door.  Then I poured a  glass of scotch to think things over, and I decided my best option would be to poison the rat without trying to confront it.  So I looked around for some kind of poison in the apartment and all I could find was furniture polish—it was Lemon Pledge—and also I thought I remembered something about rats liking peanut butter so  I mixed some Lemon Pledge with peanut butter and put it on a tiny piece of cardboard and slid it under the door and then waited.  After about fifteen minutes I decided to peer in, and the peanut butter was untouched.  So then I looked in the bathroom and didn't see it.  And then I looked around and it was up on the sink staring at me. And then I screamed like a girl again and closed the door.  I had another scotch and ultimately decided I needed to go in there and confront it, so I opened the door, didn't see it anywhere, looking all around, but there was a towel on the shower-curtain rod blocking a window ledge, and I figured it had to be on the ledge, so I grabbed the towel to pull it down, and I can't figure out to this day if I saw the rat on the ledge or it just dropped down into the bathtub, but now it was running around in the bathtub as scared as me and it couldn't get out—its claws were scraping—and so I decided I could drown it.  So I turned on the water, waiting for it to drown, and that's when I had the tragic realization that rats can swim.  But then I thought, I've got it trapped, so now I just have to kill it, and I went back to the kitchen looking for something more poisonous than Lemon Pledge and I found the Comet kitchen cleanser.  So I went back in and the rat was swimming around in one end of the bathtub, and I poured a bunch into the other end of the tub, and it  formed this large scary green pool.  The rat swam toward it, and the second it hit the pool, it turned belly-up.  Then I realized I had to get it out of the tub, and I didn't want to touch it, so I used a plastic bag and cut holes in it to drain the water, and I ran it out to the incinerator chute."