Oh, I'm just heading to Hell. You?

Was talking with my aunt about rodent infestations and she said;

“People don’t have the guts to kill the rats they’d just caught by hand. What do you think they do?”

“Um... leave it outside until it starves to death?”

“Exactly... especially if the sun’s scorching hot outside. Kills them faster.”

That’s when a wave of guilt hit me. Hard. I must have repressed this memory for a while, but it all came back during this conversation.

When I was in the UK, in my first semester, in the narrow, unkempt and dingy little house I stayed in, we had rodents. No, I’m not talking about my landlord. Well, maybe partly.

There was a whole family of them, from the size of a grizzly sun bear to a sea plankton.

We had to hide all our food in little containers, but when they started eating through the containers and even ate our lotion, moisturisers and some of my friends’ make-up, that’s when we got down to business.

Our home-pest-control aspiring little senior set up traps using the rat glue bought from pound stores, which worked surprisingly well. We’d wake up to the sound of thrashing and squealing, sometimes from two separate sources. One from the bathroom, and one from the kitchen cabinet.

“So... how do we get rid of them? Release them outside?”

“Yeah, sure. It’s like this game we play with the rats. Let them find their way back and see how often we would catch the same ones repeatedly. Maybe put a little mark on it to see how many times we caught Whiskers or Jerry.”

“Then what? Just leave it to starve outside?”

“We can do that too, so it can start calling for help from other rodents. We just have to prepare the Welcome to your New Home! banner for the newcomers first.”

“Then what?”

And it was decided. We would just give them a quick death. Well, guess who got the honour of giving just that? That’s right, the person whose nails weren’t just done or who isn’t wearing a new top from Topshop.

Me.

Perpetual guilt from inhuman cruelty is negligible compared to ruining beautiful red acrylic on germs-infested nails and cute purple tops with hearts on it, you know?.

They suggested drowning them in boiling water (Jeez, and I’m supposed to be the tough one?) but I didn’t have the heart for it. I wanted a quicker, less torturous death for these transporters of the black plague so this is how I killed several of them:

1. Wrap it in thick newspaper until I’m sure the ickiness wouldn’t seep through the layers, onto my skin and into my blood streams, killing me slowly with icky rat stuff.

2. Holding the rat firmly with both hands, one hand encircling the belly, fully rotund from ingesting all that coconut-scented hand lotion and No. 5 mascara and another hand wrapped around its head.

3. Twist.

4. Twist very hard.

Of course, such a deprived, vile act came with its own consequence. The rat problem went away after everyone adroitly handled the catching and I handled the killing. Though for weeks after that, I couldn't help but relive the moral agony.

...The little pleading squeaks as I held it tight.

...The futile thrashing in my hands.

...The heat from a live creature seeping warmth into my palms as it used up every ounce of its energy to free itself from the captivity of death.

...The trilling squeak that escalated in volume right before the sudden, cruel twist.

...The minuscule, almost indiscernible crunch as tiny, fragile bones break

...The little body going limp as I ended the life of another living creature.

...

...

...

Ah well. It was either them or my favourite Kellogg’s Crunchy Nut Clusters (With chocolate curls!)

Acid Man's Inspiration

Was combing through my backlog of unread Reddit posts, and came upon this interesting article.

Anyway, it hints that throughout Asia, mostly where women are still subjugated and expected to be servile, obsequious slaves for men or where misogyny runs rampant, acid attacks are not that out-of-place and most of the time, much like how rape and wife-beatings are turned a blind eye upon (sometimes, even encouraged), the culprits are never hunted, let alone apprehended.

Then, it led me to this article, which then states that wife burnings is common in certain parts of Asia.

...How can I be so ignorant of something like this?

Here are some salient parts directly quoted from the article (Click on the link, you lazy sloths):

"Since 1994, Ms. Bukhari has documented 7,800 cases of women who were deliberately burned, scalded or subjected to acid attacks, just in the Islamabad area. In only 2 percent of those cases was anyone convicted."

"This month in Afghanistan, men on motorcycles threw acid on a group of girls who dared to attend school. One of the girls, a 17-year-old named Shamsia, told reporters from her hospital bed: “I will go to my school even if they kill me. My message for the enemies is that if they do this 100 times, I am still going to continue my studies.”

“I screamed,” Ms. Azar recalled. “The flesh of my cheeks was falling off. The bones on my face were showing, and all of my skin was falling off.”"

We're angry that the police force aren't aggressively hunting down the "Acid Man" (Though I'm not sure how most came to that conclusion), despite the fact that he probably hasn't been exactly eager to indulge in his perverse act when a baton-wielding policeman is traipsing along congested areas. At least we look upon this act as abhorrent and completely appalling, and the media coverage it has gotten thus far shows how unanimous we are in observing its treachery.

These women aren't so lucky;

"Because women usually don’t matter in this part of the world, their attackers are rarely prosecuted and acid sales are usually not controlled. It’s a kind of terrorism that becomes accepted as part of the background noise in the region."

Here are more pictures but honestly, for greater impact, just visit the site itself.

The backstory is that they got attacked simply for rejecting an offer for marriage, to settle a family dispute, because she tried to divorce her deadbeat husband, because her father didn't want another girl, was raped by three men and was later given an acid bath, etc.

I... don't know how to react to this.