Free Magical Thinking by Augusten Burroughs

came to me in the same way Jesus comes to those who drink in trailers: as an epiphany.
    The rat/thing came from the faucet.
    How else? It certainly couldn’t have come from the floor and climbed straight up the side of the tub. Nor could it have come from mere air. It had to have come from the faucet. Which is really, when you think about it, nothing but a steel foyer for rodents to enter your home.
    The fact was: if a rat/thing managed to claw its way out of my tub and enter the main area of the studio apartment, I would never be able to locate it. Everywhere there were mounds of foreign magazines, month-old newspapers, a thousand or more empty sixteen-ounce beer cans. I happened to live in squalor that was more than four-feet deep throughout the apartment. If the rat/thing made it into my debris field, it could easily make a nest for itself under the bed in an old aluminum beef vindaloo container or it could simply die beneath an old copy of Italian
Vogue
. It could die and it could rot.
    Quite simply, if the rat/thing did manage to make it out of the tub, I would need to move. I would need to simply abandon the apartment. And because this would place me in default on a lease, I would also need to leave the state.
    A rat/thing with sinister red eyes and sharp little talons would be quite at home here in my little hovel.
    I had to kill it.
    I looked around my apartment, scanning for a vehicle of death.
The Secret History
by Donna Tartt? It was on the floor next to my bed. Surely, this would flatten it. But the problem was, there was no way I could flatten the rat with a hardcover book, especially not a first edition. Like strangulation, flattening-by-book was too intimate an act. If I were a serial killer, I would not be the kind that stabs and then eats the victim. I would be the kind that hides in a tree and shoots at the aerobics class.
    Again, I heard the scratching. I got out of the chair and turned on every light in the apartment, making it as bright as an operating room. Somehow, the apartment needed to be extremely bright in order for me to think clearly.
    Then I saw the red can, Raid ant killer, on the floor next to the toilet bowl. I read the back about how contact with skin can cause damage: “If inhaled, remove victim to a source of fresh air or, if necessary, provide artificial respiration.”
    Very slightly, my mouth watered. It was worth a try.
    I stepped up to the tub. The rat/thing was cowering near the drain. But cowering? Perhaps planning, perhaps conserving strength. I could see the muscles beneath its dirty white fur. It absolutely looked at me, making eye contact. Its little whiskers twitched. Its tiny claws and feet tensed, ready to charge.
    I aimed the can at the rat/thing and pushed the button. Right away, it began to scurry toward the opposite end of the tub, and I followed, still pressing. A moist cloud of toxic, ozone-burning, nature killer filled the tub, and the air became slick with the scent.
    I sprayed the rat/thing until it was dripping.
    But instead of killing it, the Raid had only emboldened the rodent. Now, instead of merely trying to scamper up the impossible incline, it was charging furiously from the drain to the other end and making it higher up the incline. Because the tub was slick with Raid, it fell back. But had the tub not been slick with Raid, the rat/thing would have certainly escaped. Peering closer, I saw that its eyes were now clouded, the corneas burned away by the chemicals. Blindness had obviously empowered the rat/thing, made it bold and angry and determined.
    I held the button down until the brand-new can of Raid was sputtering a drizzle.
    And yet, there it was. The rat/thing, running an angry circle in the center of the tub, shaking its coat like a dog, and sending little Raid droplets flying everywhere.
    I tossed the empty can on the floor and looked at the beast for signs of impending death. I watched its little chest contract and expand with encouraging speed.