I got home from work on Tuesday morning after working a 12 and 1/2 hour night shift with the awful beginnings of a headcold. The only thing I wanted to do was crawl in my bed and pass out for 9 hours until I had to wake up at 5 pm to get ready to go back to work.
I was all cuddled in bed under my down comforter when, all of the sudden, there was an awful sound coming from the corner of my bedroom. It was clearly an animal, but I was so confused. I live on the third floor, I wondered what kind of rodent would pick my apartment and why (especially since I’m kind of a neat freak now).
There was this noise that sounded a bit like a squeal, and I knew it was too big of a noise to be a mouse. My mind immediately jumped to rat, and then I curled up in the fetal position and was afraid to get out of bed to see if I could find out what was happening.
You know that sound that an animals cage makes when the animal’s all running around goofy? I had a few hamsters growing up and they somehow all developed some crazy hampster disease called “wet tail” which made them go a little nutso and they’d run around and jump all around the cage and you could hear the sound of their crazy little paws on the metal. I was hearing that sound, and it was freaking me out as I started imagining a 20 pound rat in my Ikea garbage can.
Then, I heard a noise that sort of sounded like whatever it was had fallen, like it was moving away, and not in a slow fashion. I concluded that whatever it was must have been in the ducts or something and it had fallen back down to the ground floor. When I woke up that afternoon, I inspected my room and found no trace of rat droppings, and was thus satisfied enough that I wasn’t going to have my toes eaten while I was asleep.
After another night and a bit stuffier of a head, I crawled up all the stairs to my apartment and fell over in bed. Then I heard it again. The squeaking, the talons on metal sound. I grabbed my glasses and then I saw it. Outside the window.
A pigeon. A freaking pigeon, flying repeatedly into my air conditioner. Sometimes it would land, sometime it would miss, but it kept flying into it over and over and over. I have no idea what it was doing, but I know it was keeping me awake, and I was not too happy about it.
Maybe it was the soul of my dead cockateil, Benny, coming back to haunt me. Or maybe the pigeon just got wet tail or something. But I haven’t heard from it since.
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