“Damn Mike, that’s terrible. I would have freaked,” the first teacher said. “What did you do?”

“The rat wouldn’t move. It just kept on sitting there staring at me,” Mike continued. “I thought for sure as soon as I moved it would move. It was like it was hypnotized or something. Finally I grabbed a book near my bed, swatted it and it ran away.”

“Are you okay Mike?” I asked.

Mike nodded and went to class.

By the end of the day, everyone in the institute was talking about the Mike’s rat and how freaked they would have been had it happened to them. His apartment mate, Alex confirmed the story and added one more crucial detail: how he and Mike had spent the rest of the night turning the apartment upside down trying to find that rat.

“Finally, we gave up, but we did locate where it had gotten into the apartment,” Alex said.

“Where was that,” I asked.

“In the kitchen, inside one of the cupboards,” Alex explained. “Our rat or the former rat had gnawed a hole in one corner of the cupboard and that is where we suspected it came in. We plugged up that hole good. If the rat did get in through that hole, it’s not going to get back in again.”

The next day, when Mike came into the staff room, he was just as visibly shaken as he had been the day before.

“Well, did your plug job do the trick?” a teacher asked.

Mike shook his head. “The rat pushed the plug out. He was in my room when I went home last night. Alex and I chased him around the apartment for an hour but he escaped again.”

Mike grabbed his class folder and muttered something about how he wished he had a baseball bat to smash the rat’s head in the next time he came back as he walked out of the staff room.

He was never the same after that rat incident. He had a hard time sleeping at night because he was worried the rat would come back. Many mornings, when he shuffled into the staff room after another sleepless night, wouldn’t say much to anyone other than a few grunts when someone asked him how he was that morning.

After two more terms, Mike had had enough of Korea and left. No one ever heard from him again.