When I was a teenager and lived with my parents, one day there was a rat in our apartment. She was completely invulnerable to all my attempts to take her away, catch her, or destroy her. After a few days of looking at these futile efforts, my father got involved. He was a military officer and graduated from the Academy.
The General Staff and operations were planned with the appropriate scale. First, he fired from a gun into the plinth, behind which a rat scratched.
The gun was really low-caliber, but we didn’t hunt the cockroach.
I think she began to binge after that, but after a few days resumed her binge. I will not even describe the next three days of the battle – this is a short story, not an epic “War and Peace.” I will only say that at the final stage of the battle we localized the unfortunate rat in the kitchen and took out a bit of ALL the furniture and dishes, leaving only two untouchable refrigerators, under the engine of one of which she was hiding. There was a deep sense in the presence of two shelters – my father was splashing hot water on the engine, and at this time I caught a rat with a clutches while trying to break into the second refrigerator. Somewhere after her five successful breakthroughs, the rat disappeared at all. It seemed absolutely impossible in an empty kitchen, our protection could not be described. Finally, following the method of deduction, I raised my eyes to the ceiling and found her there – she walked around the garden. When I caught her, she painfully bitten my finger through a thick cloth and arranged some kind of fighting with me. I would have drowned her in the toilet without thinking, but my military dad was more humane. He decided to take her to a remote wash with the words "other people will tell us not to appear." Mother echoingly noted that with such kindness all the rats of the area will come to us at least out of curiosity, but the decision of the father was relentless - although a few days ago he almost shot her, now the defenseless rat has obtained obviously the status of a prisoner of war. The father pushed the cloth with the rat into the old tea box, closed the lid tightly and had already gone out to the entrance door, but ran back home for a minute to pick up the cigarettes. When he returned to the doorstep, the tea bar was no longer there – he was whispered. The bitterness of the loss of the tea barrel was softened by a quite predictable picture of further events – a happy thief came home, put the tea barrel on the table, opened the lid, pulled the cloth...