The thing in the kitchen

A bit of flash fiction on this bleak winter’s day

There’s something living in my kitchen ceiling. It moved in about three weeks ago. At first I thought it might be my cat playing around on the roof, as he is wont to do when he has a corpse he wants to toy with. But my cat was on the bed and the scratching sound coming from a space above the stairs was not some ventriloquist act he was performing in his sleep. My cat dreams quietly, his paws twitching a little while he purrs ever so softly.

No, the thing in the kitchen ceiling is definitely not my cat. I lie awake at 2:47am listening to the loud stomping at the other end of the house, while my cat decapitates and fillets a mouse next to me. Whatever now lives in the ceiling, it is quite industrious. It appears to be building something. I hear it drag things from one end of the space above the kitchen to the other. Sometimes it tears things. Sometimes it dances a delightful jig. I try to go back to sleep again by chanting prime numbers and reciting pi. If this doesn’t work, I get up and bang on the ceiling with the broom handle. That usually shuts it up long enough for me to drift back to sleep.

A practical person would get someone in to fumigate, or eradicate, or something destructive. I prefer to live with the mystery. It gives me something to wonder about when I wake in the middle of the night, anxiety clutching my heart and tightening my neck. After dreaming about small dogs in chariots made of Lego trying to kill each other in the gladiators’ arena, it can be quite soothing to listen to it for a while. I like to run through the possibilities. It’s not a mouse or a bird. Mice scurry lightly, and the birds pitter-patter like choreographed rain. This thing stomps and cavorts. It could be a rat, but it seems more frivolous. I like to think it’s a squirrel, or possibly a ferret. If I were younger, I would probably hope for a brownie, but then we’d have to have words because if it’s a brownie, it’s doing a piss-poor job of cleaning my house.

I suppose I should do something about it. The last time I let something mysterious move in, I lost two roof beams and a chimney. Those Deathwatch bastards grow really fast with a ready supply of oak. One grew to the size of a wild boar, with a temper to match, which is why the chimney died. So, yes, maybe, I should call someone. But they’re going to want to know what it is, and I don’t know the answer to that yet, and it only seems to want to dance a jig in the wee hours. I’ll wait until after the holidays. They say it might snow this week anyway. Wouldn’t want to commit murder in the snow. And anyway, I’ve still got four ceiling beams and the cellar. I’ve got space to lose.