Rats

Last night I dreamed I was in a bathroom, not my bathroom, but a dingy bathroom that I seemed familiar with. The tiles were a decay color, tan or brown or gray, I’m not really sure. Something moved under the bathmat, so I moved it with my toe and found a crawdad fighting another crawdad – they were a brilliant color orange with a white underbelly. They were fighting in a piece of tile that had been torn out, dug out, exposed. They were fighting in the dirt under the floor. For some reason I thought of an ex boyfriend from long ago and when I turned around I saw a huge wound in the floor where tiles had been ripped up, where the bodies of dead crawdads fell upturned. There was another hole by the wall. Stuffed with orange shells, with empty bodies. In the middle hole, I saw a rat trundle out. I screamed and looked to my step-dad who was sitting in the corner of the room. He grabbed it quickly and threw it against the wall, but it didn’t die. It ran under his legs and he grabbed it again as I noticed the blood splatter on the wall, the guts from previous rats that had been killed. And as he snatched for the live rat again, it reached around and bit him and with only the tail pinched between his fingers, my step-dad flung the rat like a Frisbee against the wall until the rat’s skull and body was broken.