The Rat

When I was still in grade school, we moved over 100 miles South from where I was born. My father had gotten a promotion, not more money - just more work, and we had to relocate.
We moved to a home that had been standing empty for a couple of years because of being tied up in court with a divorce. The house was up a long lane and the yard was overgrown with weeds from the road clear to the house.
Since the place was empty and out in the middle of nowhere, teenagers had been using the long driveway for a lover's lane. My little brothers soon discovered that someone had left "balloons" and brought them in the house for someone to inflate for them. My aunts, sisters, mom, and I were trying to clean the very dirty house so we could move the furniture in when it got there. My mom was horrified when she saw what my brothers had and my one aunt quickly tossed the balloons, scrubbed the little ones' hands, and whisked them off with my little sisters to her home for safe keeping.
My father and uncles were out trying to tackle the yard. My dad saw that there were signs of rats in the barn and not wanting to alarm my mom after what she had just gone through, he quietly put out a bunch of rat poison and told all of us to stay away from the barn.
Several days later, while dad was at work, mom wanted to go see if the barn was usable. She told me she was going out to check it and I informed her that dad had told us to stay away from it. Thinking that he had said this because he didn't want the boys to get into things, she thought that it would be okay for her to go check it out. I told her that I would go in with her.
We went to the two big doors on the front and opened them up. We stepped just inside the barn and was letting our eyes get accustomed to the dark and also to look around for the light switch. To our right, on a beam about head high to us, sat a dead rat. My mom jumped a little when she saw it causing me to jump also. She stood there a minute watching it and finally determined that it had died in that position. We were looking at it making comments on how strange it was that it had breathed its last and ended up just perched there like that. Mom saw the light switch just to the right of the rat and reached up to turn on the electricity and that dead rat turned and ran.
I am not sure which way it ended up going because mom and I were in a foot race to the house screaming at the top of our lungs. I was only fourteen years old and my mom had had polio when I was born. I couldn't believe it when I finally ran into the house and there sat my mom at the kitchen table shaking and laughing her head off. Although this event happened well over forty years ago, we still can get a good laugh over the whole moving in experience and the day we saw "The Rat"!