I killed my first rat this week.

Okay, let me clarify...I don't know if he's dead or not but I'm assuming that by now, he's toast.

For weeks I had seen this little grey blob dart across the floor...shockingly enough, the first rat I have EVER had in any apartment in NYC. Finally, I caught it darting behind the sink before it ran down behind the refrigerator and realized that it wasn't my eyes playing tricks on me but was a rat. A small one, but a rat nevertheless. I walked across the street to the D'Agostinos and found the rat glue traps and set them out. I was skeptical about their success but sure enough, the next morning I woke up and there was the offending creature caught up in the sticky, icky glue.

And it was still breathing.

For some reason I told myself that I couldn't bear to put him in the trash in that state because surely it might pop off somehow, chew through the bag, and then run off back to his base camp and I would come home to find my apartment covered in rats out to take their revenge on me.

So I went to work and rugby practice thinking that when I got home the rat would have died and I could just deposit him in the trash bag, take it downstairs, and be done with it.

Wrong.

Over twelve hours later and the thing was still breathing and still very much mired in the glue. I'm not sure if the brown flecks I saw in teh glue were rat feces or where it possibly had chewed off one of it's legs in a vain attempt to get free. I couldn't bear to let the creature go like that so I took the other rat trap I had laid out, placed it on top of the other, effectively making a glue trap sandwich, and put it in the trash, and took the bag downstairs.

The odd thing is though...I keep thinking about the rat and how he must have suffered. And I kinda hate myself for it...even if my apartment is now rat free.