I grew up in the suburbs of Wisconsin among five-year-old trees and hypoallergenic pets. Non-domesticated fauna were pretty much limited to white-tailed deer and small, orange foxes—though I never actually saw the latter. I wouldn’t even believe those foxes existed except that every few years some neighbor wept over the fact that one had eaten her toy poodle.

I had such limited contact with wild animals that I started to fetishize them. Petting zoos and regular zoos became my preferred places to host birthday parties. I wrote fully illustrated stories about girls named Kathleen who befriended mice and birds like Snow White. I also wrote stories about tigers that escaped from circuses, mauling and beheading the clowns in the process—a full massacre—in part because I hated clowns, but mostly because I wholeheartedly empathized with tigers.

Anyway, by the time I finally ventured forth from that verdant and mall-topian sprawl, I equated environments like the one I’d grown up in with minimal wildlife, and I consequently deduced that polluted and cement-laden cities must be even less hospitable to non-human species. I also thought that I was at the top of the food chain, and rightly so; the foxes didn’t bother me, and when deer traipsed into my yard, I could always chase them out. Moreover, I was a carnivore.

So imagine my surprise when I moved to New York City and found that it was host to a litany of feral critters, and that these animals could also be very scary, and that they even tended to leech off of and cohabitate with unwitting residents like me. Since moving here, my darkest moments have usually occurred against the backdrop of disturbing relationships with vermin. In the more terrifying instances, I’ve found myself in places on the food chain where I definitely don’t belong.

I’m an animal lover. But New York City has rattled my devotion.

Bugs

I arrived at my first New York City apartment panting from the five-floor walk up and feeling like a queen. I had found the Chinatown sublet on Craigslist and planned to start my publishing internship the very next day. My self-sufficiency and editorial aspirations made me feel like Carrie Bradshaw in the chrysalis phase.

Unfortunately, the apartment wasn’t exactly what I’d been expecting. There were five other people living there, for starters, and only one bathroom for the pack of us. Being the newest addition, I was also last in line for the toilet, and more than once I pounded on the door in desperation only to be told to “go in a bag if it’s such an emergency.”

The bathroom itself was incredibly small, had recessed flooring, and lacked drainage. By the time it was my turn to shower it had gotten really wet in there. There were always about two inches of standing water, and I had to decide whether to skinny dip my way across or try to hurdle the dirty lagoon and risk slipping and cracking my head on the tiles. The last thing I wanted was for my obviously unfriendly roommates to find me unconscious and naked—what might they think? So I wallowed through the muck.

Bugs came.

I noticed the water bugs first. I didn’t know what to do about them because I was twenty years old and an idiot. In my mind, I only had one towel, and it was for my body. I couldn’t use it to absorb the excess water, and I didn’t know how else to deal with the situation. So every day I waded through ankle-high runoff, took my shower, created more spillage, and put the troubling yet harmless insects out of my mind before it was time to head to work.

The bedbugs were harder to ignore.

I started waking up with blistery bumps all down my legs. But it was summertime, and about 100 degrees inside my bedroom, so for a while I told myself, and others—because in New York, people are prone to ask about potential bedbug bites in loud and nervous voices—that it was heat rash. I’d never actually had heat rash before, and as someone who had only ever worried about bugs during brief stints at a Bible Camp in Lake Geneva, I associated insects, by and large, with things like forests, muggy sleeping bags, and Jesus songs complete with sign language. In New York, aside from the sores blooming on my legs, none of those warning signs existed, so I remained unconcerned.

I managed to delude myself until I discovered what looked like apple seeds in the seams of my mattress. After comparing them to photographs online, and confirming my worst infestation fears, I polled my roommates about chipping in for an exterminator. But they were even more delusional than I had been; instead of freaking out with me, they freaked out at me, saying that there were not any bugs in the apartment, and that if there were, I’d brought them in—because they certainly weren’t responsible. Then they shut their doors, and collectively pressured me via email to start showering at the YMCA.

During my Googling spree, I uncovered several homemade remedies for combating bedbugs and swiftly employed them all. Most notably, I ditched my mattress and invested in an Aerobed. Then I laid double-sided tape around it like a moat. In the mornings, the tiny bedbugs were trapped on the adhesive—along with spiders and cockroaches.

After enough time in Chinatown, I dreaded falling asleep. I knew that by morning everything that crawled toward me at night would be laid bare against the double-sided tape. To cope psychologically, I sprayed myself with bug spray and pretended I was camping.

I started to hate New York City, too. Most days I identified less with other humans than I did with the pig heads displayed in the Chinatown butcher windows: my mind detached from my body, my teeth clenched in anticipation of the deathblow.

Pigeons

Pigeons haven’t really resided in Wisconsin since the late 1800s—and those were carrier pigeons, enslaved by my people for the purpose of correspondence. So I’d never known one before moving to New York, and upon arriving I initially found the mangy, gurgling, omnipresent birds to be exotic despite the fact that they were filthy.

At first I fed them. During my lunch hour, I’d break off pieces of my hot dog bun and toss it to the most bedraggled-looking one. On good days I saw myself as Mary Poppins. On not-so-good days — like when my bed bug bites itched so badly that I entertained weird amputation fantasies — it was more like The Pigeon Lady from Home Alone 2. Either way, on some level, I was a woman at one with nature.

Then a legless pigeon tried to drag itself to my hot dog with its beak, only to be publicly mauled to death by its more robust brethren. As it died writhing on the sidewalk, I started to see things differently. From then on, I screamed when pigeons warbled by my ankles, noticing only their gnarled toes and sticky feathers. Their beady eyes seemed to beg for euthanasia. Even the captive horses trotting around Central Park suddenly looked depressed.

Or maybe it was just me, projecting.

(Feral) Cats

Eventually, I sprung for a $600 per month, seven-by-nine-foot room in Queens, complete with a window (!!) that looked onto a sunless concrete enclave where residents stored garbage.

After sunset, I’d watch cats crawl from the shadows, stalking edible waste. As they fought over coagulated baby formula or moldy takeout, I’d sit on my narrow mattress in my narrow room picking crud off my work shoes. I fell asleep to impassioned meowing and the sound of plastic shredding underneath predatory paws. It was pretty clear based on what they sometimes dragged from neighbors’ trash bags and managed to digest that these cats would have gladly eaten my face, given the chance. But still, I rooted for them. Based on the way I tended to pounce on the free beers that magically appeared in the conference room at my office building every Friday, I sometimes felt like a stray, too.

Black Squirrels

Who knows how the feral cats missed their opportunity to eat this guy—there were so many of them and so few of him—but a black squirrel would occasionally appear on the lip of my window, scratching on the screen.

This sounds cute but it wasn’t. It reminded me of my senior year, when my dad and I lived in what I felt certain was a haunted cabin. Occasionally, when I was home alone doing my homework after dark, I’d hear a rustling noise and look up to see a white tailed doe brushing her forehead against the window, back and forth, her big, black, bottomless eyes staring straight at me. It only happened a couple of times but it scared the bajeezus out of me. When a normally skittish beast knocks on your door, it’s unsettling. Demon possession springs to mind. And besides, by the time the black squirrel started twitching on my window ledge, I’d seen enough diseased pigeon feet and slept with enough bedbugs to know I didn’t want to live with whatever this particular rodent was carrying. I didn’t want it anywhere near me.

Then one day I climbed into the shower to see it sitting back on its hind legs, luxuriating in the steam. I screamed and it chattered, skittering in a tight circle but not leaving. Eventually I had to simply get out. The shower belonged to the black squirrel now. I went to work with dirty hair, feeling weird the whole day—and though I never saw it in the bath again, or found out how it had gotten there to begin with, I always checked to make sure the it wasn’t busy in there before I took my morning shower. I also started putting raisins on the windowsill, so that it wouldn’t act so starved and hyper when it did show up. After a while I started to think of it as a sort of pet. A pet I never, ever, wanted to touch.

Chickens

Queens ended up being too far away from my social life in Brooklyn and proved nearly impossible to get to on weekends after 9pm. So I found yet another crooked broker to show me cheap places near the Gowanus Canal, and promptly settled into a place with low ceilings and windows that faced brick. A Laundromat was conveniently situated right down the street, which made the chicken slaughterhouse on the other side of my apartment slightly easier to bear.

At night I heard muffled squawking and dreamed of Santeria. Overall the combination of burnt feathers and sweet-smelling soap exhaust gave the place a weird vibe.

Rats

I found out I had a rodent shortly after sending in the deposit plus the first and last month’s rent. There were cockroaches, too, obviously—only one or two, per month, but still; if you left dishes in the sink, one would inevitably be found floating in the pot by morning. In my mind, these pests could not have have been exclusively due to filth, since the Laundromat fumes probably disinfected whatever sort of E coli from the chicken plant was floating through the air—not to mention the fact that I scrubbed the whole place with bleach every weekend. In general it was starting to dawn on me that New York’s vermin are a common denominator of sorts; due to overpopulation, cramped quarters, old construction. Regardless of socioeconomic status, no one here is immune to mice, cockroaches, or bedbugs. “Don’t take it personally,” I thought.

Anyway, I only ever saw a single rat, but given the amount of feces I found, who knows, there could have been thousands of them.

At first, I’d put out those little snap-traps with cheese. In response to my efforts, the rat(s) would eat the cheese (without setting off the trap), and then defecate all around said trap, as if to say, “Eat shit.” So I ditched the snap-traps and switched to sticky-traps. One night, I woke before dawn to a terrible shrieking sound, and after some sleepy searching, found the rat still stuck to a trap under the sink. It had gnawed through two of its own legs trying to escape, and there was blood everywhere. The rat and I were both screaming as I picked up the heavy sticky paper from one corner. At first I put on dish-washing gloves and tried to pry its remaining limbs loose, but then its feet started to tear, and I ran outside in my nightgown to toss it in the trash. “Don’t take it personally,” I said.

In part this new, blasé sense of everyone’s smallness actually allowed me to focus on more practical stuff in my life without getting overwhelmed by the bugs, the mangy (and probably near-death) cats, or by my own anonymity for that matter: stuff like finding a slightly better place—one that was closer to a better subway, and that included a bathroom where the tiles did not occasionally fall off the wall and crack dangerously close to my toes.

Bluebirds

The first time I saw a non-pigeon in New York, I was en-route from my current apartment to collect my dry cleaning. It was more than 100 degrees outside, and heat rising off the sidewalk made the sight of an adorable baby bird hopping foot-to-foot to avoid the steaming ground much more of an emergency. As the bluebird’s parents squawked in terror on the branches above me, I tucked a clean but chemical covered dress underneath their baby, careful not to touch it.

The next step was to get the fledgling into a bush or something, so that the parents could guide it back into the tree. There was a one outside the cleaners, but that bush seemed precariously close to the deli cat sunbathing down the street. Plus, I worried that the noise from construction crew hammering away in the middle of the road would make the bird’s parents too jumpy execute a proper rescue mission. So I hoisted the fledgling into my dress-hammock and walked across the street slowly enough that the parents could follow—and they did! As jackhammers pounded into concrete, we walked together toward a private garden with a tall gate. I nudged the baby bird through the slats, then peaked through to watch a miracle unfold.

As I watched in horror, a fat, collared cat crept from the manicured bushes, its eyes peeled on the peeping fledgling. I rattled the padlocked gate to try and scare it while the parents chirped frantically from the branches, but to no avail. Eventually the cat pounced and slowly ate the baby blue bird, starting with its stomach.

Just as I was about to cry, I felt a hand clamp down on my shoulder. I jerked around to see one of the construction workers towering above me, watching the display over my head. “Nature,” he shouted in a thick New York accent, struggling to be heard over the machines.

Kathleen Hale is the author of No One Else Can Have You and the forthcoming novel, Nothing Bad is Going to Happen. You can find more of her writing here & there.