I really would like to rearrange the furniture in our bedroom, but my options are somewhat limited. One wall is entirely closet, there are windows in the middle of two other walls, and the fourth has a, how shall I put this, sort of a large man-made flaw. . . . .

You see, we hadn’t lived in this house very long, when one night, we heard noises coming from inside the drywall.

“Just don’t pay any attention,” I told him. “In a few days, whatever it is will be dead and the noise will stop.”

Ordinarily that would have been true. Unfortunately, whatever it was that was trespassing inside the walls had invited a few friends over for some drinks and heavy partying, and one thing must have led to another, and, well, in a few days – far from quieting down – the noise and activity level had picked up to the point where we could actually feel the wall quivering. They were reproducing in there, and carousing, and whooping and yelling and making those scary little buck-tooth-mousie noises, and apparently living off each other, because I don’t know how else they could have stayed alive for so long.

One night, my husband couldn’t stand it. He shoved the bookcase aside (see, that’s what ADRENALINE will do!) and blasted a hole into the wall with a shotgun. He must have hit them right in the heart of the community, and the flak must have taken out quite a few, too. We never heard another peep after that night.

I occasionally have a nightmare about critters using that hole as a means to get in the house proper and poop in my shoes, and sometimes I remind him that the hole is still there and really ought to be patched for the sake of aesthetics and other fancy words, but then we both think, isn’t that what furniture is for? Besides sleeping and sitting and putting our feet up and storing things, that is? It hides holes that were blasted with a shotgun, to kill CREATURES, lest they scamper over us in our beds as we sleep, like that snake in the Sherlock Holmes story, “The Speckled Band.” That hole is a monument of sorts. It reminds us that my husband is ever the protector of this family. Nothing’s going to prance in our drywall, by golly.

Besides, now that I think about it, the last time I rearranged our bedroom furniture, back in our old house, my husband got out of bed that next morning and walked right into the wall. Almost gave himself a concussion.