A rat catching man

I met eight long-time acquaintances at a meeting. It was the end of the year. We felt bad about breaking up. We all looked at each other's faces and didn't want to part. What can we do? We moved the place and our story continued.

Six out of eight graduated from Pratt University in Brooklyn. The other, including me, visited Pratt University at the time and chose another school because it was so dangerous around it.

Somehow our story dates back to the late '70s to the early '80s. It was a story of a robbery at Myrtle and Willoughby Avenue near the Pratt University. Now it was a safe neighborhood lined with antique brownstone buildings, but it was so rugged that even a taxi driver could not go. Even in the middle of the day were robbed.

After watching the horror movie The Twilight Zone, A stop at Willoughby, an acquaintance rushed to marry him because she needed a man to protect herself because she was even more afraid of Willoughby Avenue.  Another acquaintance even said she would not go back to New York during she was on vacation in Seoul after being robbed by in broad daylight.

I didn't graduate Pratt University, so I didn't have anything to say, so I kept quiet and interrupted, "No, the robber's gone, but where have all those rats and cockroaches gone?" "There still are big rats on the streets of Manhattan at dawn. That's because we all live out of difficult times and live in good places.”

I used to be surprised to see cockroaches scurrying away when I came back to the studio and turned on the lights. An acquaintance used the dishes by putting them in a zip bag and taking them out. I couldn't stand the smell of baking fish and saw a mouse coming out from time to time, so I climbed up on the chair and screamed. I hate mice as much as robbers. I married because I thought I needed a man to catch a mouse.

My husband is good at catching mice. A drop of sesame oil on a piece of yellow cheese on a rat frame will catch the little mice. Sometimes, the staggered mouse was buried in the backyard for manure. The soil in the back yard is glossier with the carcasses of the young sparrows falling from the crack in the wall next door.

Although she got married because of robberies and I got married unconditionally because needed a man who caught a rat, now we are all well off in a place where there are no rats and few robbers. I fell into the numerous stories of difficult times that seemed to never end even if we chatted all night.