This week seems to be a waiting game: both the markets I have stories with at the moment are taking longer than usual to get back to me, though I suppose I can’t blame the reply coming via mail snails. The mail snails are very earnest! They’ve dropped off a great number of my short story rejections over the years. I appreciate their efforts. On the email submission system, I’ve been watching the numbers tick down through a fairly hefty queue ahead of me, so that’s understandable too.
Speaking of critters, it came to my attention that some of the people around me didn’t understand the particular flight of fancy that’s my sign-off from lunch at work. When I have my IM on at lunch, and then I have to head back down to the company’s lab in the basement, I often tell people that I’m off to brave the basement coyotes. Someone finally asked me the other day what the heck I was talking about.
You have to understand two things, to understand the basement coyotes. First, our company’s basement. It’s actually fairly small, and I find it quite homey at this point because I’ve been going down there at least briefly pretty well every work day for four years. But my office building was built at the turn of the century and remodeled since, so there’s weird shaped hallways, unreinforced masonry walls that eye you malevolently and snicker about what they’d do to you in an earthquake, and nowhere near enough places to wire in lights.
Second, you have to understand the hallways in the older university buildings at WWU, where I did my bachelors. Western has a number of these plank mold poured concrete buildings that are ugly as anything on the outside. They also tend to have these completely concrete stairwells with heavy metal fire doors, so when the door slams shut behind you, you’re encased in a space that is simultaneously dead and weirdly echoey, with no hint of sounds from the outside world. It’s fine in passing times, filled with people, but on the weekends, I always felt like there must be predators hiding in the corners. Coyotes always seemed like the kind of scrappy urban dwellers that would take to the new territory with ease. Those are stairwell coyotes.
Basement coyotes are their cousins. They’re less transient, and more settled. I know the ones downstairs, so they don’t bother me anymore.
Though as far as actual, literal critters, the only things the basement has been able to muster has been a couple rats (intuited by droppings, and then one caught out of our little area–no reoccurence as of yet) and on one memorable occasion, a dead bat. In the uncertain light down there, I took it for about a day to be a ball of duct tape, and joked to someone else about how I kept thinking it was a dead bat. Finally, I toed it into the light, and–nope. Actually a dead bat.