My 13-Inch Long Rat

13 inches. Yep, you heard that correctly! The last few weeks have been a series of unfortunate events for my roommates and I, all revolving around one 13-inch long menace of a rat. Let me start from the beginning.

I woke up at 2 a.m. to one of my roommates screaming in the common room. “AHHHHHHH guys I think there’s a rat in our room!!” You get the image. During this first spotting, the rat was inside of a chip bag, munching away. When it heard my roommate, it got scared and ran across the top of the desk (it can climb!!) to some abyss in our common room.

Now, the fact that this rat was eating the chips is quite humorous because, for the past few days, the owner of the chips had been vehemently accusing all of us of stealing her chips. Although I am known to be a stealer of snacks, it genuinely was not me that was eating her chips — it was our resident rat, who, according to building ops, had been living with us and sharing our food supply for around a week at this point. Upon closer inspection of our food, most of the apples that we had left on our windowsill had little rat bites on them, and one fallen soldier apple had been fully devoured behind the fridge.

The fact that we had been actively sharing food with a RAT was already disturbing enough. Naturally, we started wondering if the mysterious illness that we had all come down with and were unable to get rid of was somehow related to our evil little pet and the unnaturally large feces that it had been leaving for us. The hantavirus, perhaps? The next bubonic plague, even?

Upon our first urgent call to building ops, our dweller was able to slyly evade capture and was nowhere to be found. Apparently, the larger the rat, the larger its brain, meaning that the largest rats are frequently smart enough to identify and avoid traps. Isn’t that nice? Over the period of a few days when he was nowhere to be found, we grew fond of the idea of him and began calling him our little Remy.

However, Remy was not too fond of us, and reappeared under the sink in our bathroom. Not only did he make his presence known, but he proceeded to run towards my roommate and try to climb the sink when she jumped on top of it. An unpleasant interaction, to say the least. Upon THIS urgent call to building ops, Remy was trapped in the bathroom with seemingly nowhere to run.

Remy always has a trick up his sleeve, though. This time, it was pure girth. The building ops guy told us that he tried to pick him up, but he was simply “too heavy.” We now learned that Remy is 13 inches long and around the size of a cat. Furthermore, the building ops person took a video of Remy, but refused to send it to us, because “it would go viral.”

HMMMMMM. Very interesting.

So Remy escapes again. He somehow managed to work his way into the radiator, leaving everybody puzzled about what to do next. Finally, a zookeeper is sent our way. Yes, a zookeeper. Naturally, we had some questions for this zookeeper about how dangerous our new tenant was.

“Should we be worried about getting bit by the rat?” someone asked.
“No no no don’t worry guys,” the zookeeper responds. “A rat bite is really no worse than a pig bite.”

This one was a real head scratcher. A pig bite?? I literally have zero sense of what a pig bite would be like, and have absolutely no desire to further understand the concept. I feel like a pig bite would be extremely unpleasant, so I’m not sure if this response was really on the scale that I would have liked.

Anyways, Remy managed to evade the zookeeper as well and died an honorable death in our ceiling. The absolute vile smell that he left made it seem like he really did have the last laugh. He was pulled out of the ceiling and hoisted out in a body bag of disturbing size.

Goodbye Remy. Gone, but certainly not ever forgotten.