The Problem

I’ve heard that coffee won’t stain your teeth if you’ll put just a splash of milk in it. When I bared my teeth at the mirror this morning, the vision impressed me that I probably ought to test that theory, but while pouring coffee a few minutes later, I couldn’t bring myself to adulterate the brew. I tried not to think of the grizzle-haired, dirty-toothed face of animal predation that I am certain to acquire after a few more years of coffee drinking.

I pulled out a plate of cinnamon rolls from the fridge to go along with the coffee. I’d decided to make cinnamon rolls yesterday. The whole process had taken about 5 hours and had depended heavily upon the culinary advice of a lady in town whose cinnamon-roll-baking experience I inquired about in numerous phone calls beginning with, “Hey, one more question…” When the rolls were finally baked and glazed, I called her house, asking if she and her husband would like to sample the finished product. They said they’d be delighted, so I dropped by with a plate of rolls and a french press of decaf coffee, and we spent the evening talking and playing with their 3-month old baby girl. Sadie McLean is her name, and although she could smile, she seemed to prefer making spit bubbles with her tongue and jerking her wobbly head around, kicking her pink little feet.

The rolls had been warm and gooey then, but although they were cold this morning, they still tasted good. As I ate I read from Luke 1, and then practiced reciting Mary’s Song from memory a few times. “He has exalted those of humble estate.” I reflected on the promise of exaltation for the lowly and weak which the Gospel echoes over and over. A glance at my clock reminded me that I had language class in an hour, so I finished my reading, hopped through the shower, and hurried back into my room in a towel to get dressed.

I opened my top drawer and grabbed boxer shorts off the top of the stack and started backwards in surprise, dropping the shorts back into the drawer. I lifted them again slowly by a corner and peeked underneath at three little babies asleep, curled up in a pile of my boxer shorts, pink and hairless, with their little tails tucked under them. One of them lifted its face in distress at the light which had suddenly invaded its womb-like darkness, and I dropped the boxers back down. I walked into another room, where some of my laundry was drying on a line and found a pair of dry boxers and put them on. Clearly, a mother rat had crawled into my top drawer the night before and given birth. I dressed myself out of the other drawers, and then returned to my problem in the top one.

I quickly decided that I couldn’t let rats grow in my underwear drawer. Rats carry disease, I reasoned. I remember adding, absurdly, at the time, especially these third-world rats. I realized, though, that moving them was the same as killing them. I could scoop them up and put them in a corner somewhere where they would starve and die. I could place them outside where they’d be eaten – alive and painfully – by street dogs probably. I could kill them myself, quickly. I thought about Darwinism and how these babies and I were just competing for resources. I thought about how the street dogs wouldn’t feel squeamish about tearing them apart for a meal, if I put them outside, and how I probably wouldn’t have to witness the event.

I emptied the drawer item-by-item, careful to shake out everything and always on edge that the mother would leap out at me any second, but she never came. The babies squealed when I took their cushion from them, and they jerked their pink arms around with an infantile incoherence. I took a plastic bag, and with a dirty rag I lifted each one from the bottom of the wooden drawer and dropped it into the bag. They shrieked at the fall. I slipped their bag into yet another plastic bag. The dogs would have to eat something else. I tied off the bottom of the bags and for a moment considered letting them suffocate, but I knew it would take several minutes for them to die that way. I sat the doubled bag on the kitchen counter. Next to it was an industrial voltage-regulator box that weighed about ten pounds and had sides of smooth, flat metal. I lifted it over the sack. I needed to bring it down hard enough to kill them with one blow. I brought it hammering down upon the sack and heard a tiny squeal of life as I lifted it again and brought it down before even a second passed, and then again and again with so much force that I was sure I would break the box itself. The final blow burst the sack open and sent a little splatter of blood and entrails across the counter.

I sat the box down and tried to take a moment to just breathe and think, but I couldn’t because, real or imagined, there was a smell in the room now. Why hadn’t I thought about the bag bursting? It was bound to have a little air trapped in it, so of course it would burst. I pushed the biggest part of the mess into another plastic bag, and then used an old sponge to clean the rest of it. I wiped down the face of my coffee grinder and the side of the voltage-regulator. Blood splatters had already dried on the counter, so I had to scrub them off. I used soap and cleaned the area. I plugged the box in, and it still worked, although I’d thought for sure it was broken.

I hurried back into my room to gather my things, late for class now. My hands shook as I lifted my computer and put it into my bag, but I felt no emotion other than frustration at myself for not feeling something more. My Bible lay open to the epistle reading that had concluded my morning devotion, but I never glanced at it as I ran out the door. “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part, then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.”