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Monday, May 08, 2006
Rama: The case of the murdered mouse
By Karlon N. Rama
Stagefive
Her scream jolted me to wakefulness. It was a shriek hoarse with horror and the kind that one bellows only out of sheer unintelligible fright.
It peeled me off visions of vanilla ice cream and all other things pleasant in early mornings and got me running – insufficiently attired according to later testimony – toward the small anteroom that separated the dining room from the kitchen.
The crescendo had not ebbed when my feet got me to the source – my sixty-something mother standing on top of a monobloc stool pointing an accusing finger at a grayish black ball of fur that, in some other time, would have actually passed for cute.
“That filthy rat jumped on me when I opened that cardboard box,” she said in between gasps.
But I’m getting ahead of the story.
Our house in Banawa, my home for over 20 years, got some badly needed renovation a few months ago. And as not to encumber the panday, my mother packed up all our stuff in cardboard boxes and piled them in the anteroom.
She’d planned to begin unpacking and returning the stuff back to where they belonged when she had her encounter with the furry rodent that had made a home inside one of the boxes and didn’t appreciate the intrusion.
I almost laughed my head off when I found out what had gotten my mother scared enough to scramble up unto a monobloc chair – arthritis and a whole slew of other ailments here and there not withstanding – post haste.
But when she told me what was in that box the mouse called home, I laughed no more.
Immediately I kicked the box, sending the horrible and horrified rat scurrying out and away, and inspected the precious content with a nervous frown and a confirmatory disgusted groan.
The rat chose my volume of books to call home. And it apparently ate and shat where it slept, as evidenced by nibble marks in my autographed copy of Ester Tapia, Linda Alburo and Cora Almerino’s Sinug-ang (a Cebuano trio published by the Women in Literary Arts), including a chunk of a page that contained Cora’s humorous and titillating piece, Spaghetti ala Carbonara.
Anthony Tan’s Moon over Muddas, Butch Dalisay’s Barfly and a paperback compendium of Palanca-winning short story pieces weren’t spared.
Revenge shall be mine, I declared, to my mother who was now enjoying her turn to laugh.
So out came a pellet gun, a chunk of cheese and a directive that all over members of the house retire to the mall for the whole day so I can go head hunting.
It took a few hours but my quarry, that foul and evil creature of habit capable of untold amount of damage to all things in print, finally came back. She (I assume) slowly crept toward the box and, while in the open, noticed the cheese. Instinctively, she hunched low, as if to contemplate her priorities – run for cover or dive for food.
But that brief moment of hesitation was all I needed. Puffftttt went the pellet gun as I, after careful aim, held my breath, accessed the trigger, took off the slack and fired. And the rat was no more.
DOWN RANGE. Doctors from all over the region will troop to Cebu City on the 28th as Kamagong Gun Club, located inside the AFP Central Command Headquarters in Camp Lapu-Lapu, plays host to the 1st Kamagong Physician’s Pistol Match.
A five-stage competition that offers trophies in two categories plus special awards for the top senior and lady shooters, the match was conceptualized by Dr. Emmanuel Barcenas and Dr. Tyrone Jude Mercader to bolster camaraderie among medical professionals in Cebu City.
“We have shooters from Dumaguete and Bohol who have confirmed that they’ll be coming. We were actually surprised at the number of those who’ve expressed their intent to participate,” Barcenas said when interviewed Saturday.
The match, he revealed, is also being sponsored in part by the Armscor Shooting Center, Biomedis, Patriot Pharmaceuticals and Zynova Pharmaceuticals, and has been sanctioned by the PNP Firearms Explosives Security Agencies and Guars Supervisory Section, through P/Supt. Rey Lyndon Lawas.
(knrama@gmail.com)
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (May 8, 2006 issue)
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