Massacre at 212 Queen Street South
Editing the RATS out of your story…
Would it hurt your feelings if I let you know we broke into the housing market of 2005 by purchasing a power-of-sale property at $75K? An unheard of thing during these dark years of housing robbery. (Because what else can we call it in this era where my almost-grown kids are thinking they’ll have to live with mom and dad until the end of their days??)
I loved that little house and spent hundreds of hours cleaning the mess left behind by the owners who abandoned it. They left stool samples in the powder room. True story. Full specimens in lab containers sealed in Ziplock bags. But, for $75K, could we really complain?
This was the first home we owned. We had lived in a $475/month apartment in Hanover for a year. Then we’d moved into a rent-free house beside a pioneer graveyard where we were paid $11/day to do regular check-ins on the gentleman with Down syndrome who lived in the basement. From there we returned to my parents’ house while we tried (and failed) to get our act together. It wasn’t until the government and banks decided to offer a small window of 0% down mortgages that we started to grow up.
I was 22 and unemployed when I bought my first house, but it was at a time when a kid could get financing without having to sell their soul to be a TikTok influencer. It was the golden age of learning to be an adult.
We called that little home “The Buzz House” because one of the upstairs bedrooms had a Buzz Lightyear wallpaper border. Even after the border was removed and the room painted, the house remained (still to this day) The Buzz House.
It rested just above the floodplain, with the Saugeen River carving its path a few hundred yards behind our property. We made the purchase only after assurances that we didn’t need to worry about water damage. The devastating flood that rocked our little town in the 90s hadn’t risen as far as our house, so we would be safe. What we hadn’t considered was the existence of river rats. For where there is water there is, often, an army of rodents. And if I’d learned anything about my husband of four years (yes, I got married at 18 — a story for another day) he was entirely useless when it came to critters and other gross things.
At the house in Eugina he hid under a blanket while I chased a bat out the back door with a broom and a bucket. I kill the spiders. I unclog the drains. I take out the garbage. When I told him about the rat the size of a cat that jumped out of the garbage can and scrambled through the house to hide beneath the hutch at the entry he was disgusted. "Well, we’re going to have to deal with that.”
Meaning I was going to have to deal with it.
We were on the couch, watching a mindless sitcom, laughing over nighttime tea and Oreo cookies. There was a rustle in the kitchen cabinet. We both stiffened. The rat was back. Rustle...rustle...SNAP — like a pop gun. The Better RODENTRAP by intruder™. It's a heavy-duty, grey, plastic pitfall of death. There was a frantic scramble from within the coffin of the sink cabinet. Pitiful squeals. Sharp little talons struggling for purchase on the Formica cupboard lining, the trap banging against the back wall in one futile fight against inevitable assassination.
And then it was over. The death dance complete. We stared at each other, each willing the other to act, each feeling the fingers of revulsion tickling along our spines. Neither moving. Oreos sitting like so much sand on our tongues.
I waited two hours, foolishly thinking he would step up even though I knew he wouldn’t.
I donned my pretty pink rubber gloves, trying to put a little happily-ever-after into a task void of sunshine. The rat was in full rigour, surrounded in the coffee grinds he managed to free from the garbage before succumbing to my prowess. Like he was digging his own grave in a pile of Folgers Classic Roast. I disengaged the trap and he fell into the garbage bag without ceremony, nestling among slimy yogourt cups and shrivelled spinach. I removed the bag to the can on the deck where weather would petrify the corpse and the garbage man would soon relocate him far from my presence.
I returned to my husband’s smug grin, slightly traumatized, acutely annoyed. "How's it feel to know I'm more of a man than you are?"
He just laughed while I sat in the trauma of being one of those homes: infested.
Rats are evil incarnate. They are the cold fingers on the back of my neck. They are the shiver of disgust when I see that thick, naked tail, slipping through the hole beneath my sink. I do not accept them as part of God's plan and I believe in the complete annihilation of the entire demonic race.
Dear Animal Rights Activists, I dare you to challenge me!
There is no sweetness in ink black eyes, nor beauty in pointed noses and squirrelly talons. No grace in matted fur nor manners in garbage can theft. They are ugly and bold and absolutely expendable.
Over the course of several months, I knowingly murdered twelve more. Twelve rodents who met timely ends beneath the kitchen sink. Spines crushed. Heads smashed. Yellow teeth frozen in a forever grin of 'at least I got to taste your pot roast, lady!'
When our landline stopped working we were sure they had chewed through the wires. Worse was to discover that they had peed all over the box and shorted it out. God bless the poor Eastlink man who had to journey into our dungeon and fix it.
After purchasing twenty dollars worth of poison, I somehow convinced my husband to take it into the basement and spread it throughout the crawlspace.
“It’ll kill them right off and then dry all the blood out of their bodies so they don’t stink,” the man at the co-op told us.
After five days we stopped hearing them rustling below us.
I didn’t want to count my chickens before they hatched, but I certainly felt like cock-a-doodle-do-ing. We were winning the war and reclaiming our Buzz House! We were sending those beasts back to the hell they came from and I was ready to dance on their graves. To Motörhead. And I was going to love it.
But, as fate would have it, the battle wasn’t over. Yes, the genocide had been effective. What we hadn’t considered was the damage those creatures could effect. As winter descended around our little house, we got colder and colder.
Those rats! A thousand curses on their beady skulls! Killing them all was only the first step. How they mocked us from their blighted coffin beneath the floor... You poison us? — we'll show you — we'll pull down every little piece of insulation, tear it up, poop in it, make you think you're safe through the sweet waves of summer, make you forget, make you avoid, and then BAM — winter, bet you didn't know linoleum could feel like ice, did you? Bet you thought you'd won.
I was a sight to be reckoned with: my father's coveralls, rubber boots, hair tucked up into a toque, bandana over my mouth and nose, hood tied tight against any invader, work gloves — pretty was for the birds.
With a deep breath, stacks of new insulation, plastic sheeting, and a staple gun, I descended into the bowels of Queen Street hell.
A work lamp pierced the shadows and scattered ghosts. Dust danced through the beam in filthy pirouettes. It smelled of dirt and emptiness in that place never touched by sun or love. There was less than two feet between the underbelly of the house and the dirt floor of the crawlspace. I was restricted to my back or my belly and I moved slowly, replacing insulation that was salvageable and awkwardly stuffing garbage bags with what was not.
I could feel them all around me. I could feel their eyes. Their whiskers. The tickle of their ghosts as I disturbed their holy ground. I hummed to kill their hold and did okay until a fat, scowling carcass fell, bouncing off my stomach to rest, staring at me through empty sockets leaking nightmares.
I recoiled, hitting my head on a beam before I lay straight back in the dirt, my breath causing the dust to roil and laugh. My heart raced, wild and off-beat, and I found my own rigour mortis — frozen there on that bed of earth, that grave of the countless horde.
When I was calm again, I carried on. When I crawled I could hear a snap and pop and I knew I'd just put my knee on another one. It broke apart beneath me — nothing but bones and fur. It was the ugliest place in the world.
And when I was resurrected — birthed from the trapdoor in a burst of tearing eyes and coughing — I counted my blessings in a scalding shower, burning the fibreglass from my pores, steaming death from my lungs, sucking sunshine from the window, and feeling the kitchen floor that was now a little less cold though there was still much ground to cover.
Days later, my mother came to help me complete the job. Two women in coveralls. Two staple guns. Fearlessly saving my house from the icy grip of winter.
I slithered behind her, fogging up my goggles, feeling the fibreglass eating at my wrists and eyebrows as once again, I stuffed the old insulation in garbage bags and she filled the space between the studs with new.
"I wish you came when he was home so he'd feel like a dummy," I told her, referring to my less-than-helpful-scardey-cat-husband.
"Who's going to do it if we don't?" she asked.
Right. "I think he's scared." But there I was, the dust of disintegrated rat bones lining my nostrils and you didn’t see me peeing my pants and panicking in a corner, did you?
The worst part of it was that when we finally decided to sell that house, no one would appreciate this horrific sacrifice — they would only notice if we hadn’t done it.
It was hard to talk with hoods tied tight around our heads and masks covering our mouths and noses, so we didn’t really. But it was better down there with someone — just to look over and see a pair of boots through the dancing dust.
"Make sure you rub it in," she told me with a grin as she said goodbye. “Don't be mean — just make us seem like Super Woman."
And we were. We were superwomen. The Buzz House was warm again.
The next time I saw a rat was in 2018 outside the Staten Island ferry terminal. He took one look at me and then high-tailed it out of there. I had finally won the war.
Think of your own writing as a house. Sure, it looks okay on the outside. Maybe even on the inside it looks polished at first glance. But there are rats hiding among your words. Rats leave trails of waste, random commas, strange semi-colons that smell a little funny... They take something that could be great and make it sloppy and dysfunctional. Rats are as unwelcome as the poop left behind in a bathroom cabinet. And the thing is, if you don’t address the problem, your home becomes uninhabitable. No one will want to come over. Just as when you allow the “rats” to take ownership of your manuscript, no one is going to want to read it.
Yes, a lovely cover is nice. Sure, attractive typesetting can entice people to dive in. But every unchecked “rat” will push your reader further from your story, perhaps even causing them to leave it behind.
Editing is, by far, the most important and most time-intensive part of the work I do. It is, at times, maddening, as its snail’s pace projects an image of not moving forward. I know I’ve had authors on the edge of their seat as they wait months to get their edits back and the only comfort I can provide them is this: if care is not given, readers will not care.
When a manuscript comes to me, I expect it to be, at the very least, self-edited to the best of the author’s ability. This shows that they care about their house, and I, in turn, will reflect that care back on to them, resulting in what I hope is a truly polished work of art that will stand up under the scrutiny of those who select it off the bookshelf.
A first draft is vital. A second draft is essential. A third-fourth-fifth draft is the difference between a visitor who stays past 9 p.m. (in a good way) and one who takes one look at the charcuterie board you’ve prepared for their arrival, thinks olives are gross, and leaves even though the goat cheese and crackers they came for aren’t even touching the olives.
If you have done the dirty work of evicting the rats, more of your guests are going to hang around. And if they don’t (maybe because your style or genre isn’t for them) who cares? More cheese and crackers for you!
If you feel stuck in the weeds (or the crawlspace) of the editing process and need a little support along the way, I would love to invite you into my mentorship program. Together we could build a plan to keep you on track, identify the “rats” that keep popping up in your work, and find a motivational strategy to delete them from your world.
The terrible truth is that this hard work is invisible. No one will understand the intense offering of time and effort (and rat particles in your nostrils). No one will appreciate this sacrifice — they would only notice if you haven’t done it.
I am only holding space for ONE MORE (weekly) MENTORSHIP client in 2024, so if you’re feeling a little nudge (from intuition, not a rodent) book a quick FREE chat with me to see if this might be the support you need to get your work from unpolished to brilliant.
If you’d rather meet in person and you’re local, I will be at the Durham branch of the West Grey Library on Wednesday, April 17 from 10:30-noon where I serve as their writer/publisher in residence.
