Romance of Rats

Vehicles idled in the hot sun, inching along the strip of simmering pollution and crashing horns penetrating every silent seclusion between gleaming towers and the slums. The sun started to set and the alleys between buildings darkened to purple canals. Beyond the baked beltway, under tunnels and overpasses, stood swampside apartments clustered together like conjoined twins.  

Filth from the alleyways blew into the street. A slender spectre with a rag over his eyes and mouth fiddled with a wire hanger down a car door. The alarm sounded, so he smashed the window with a hammer. He reached inside, opened the door and climbed inside. He broke the lock on the glove department and took the contents. He dropped the paper receipts on the pavement, but kept the keys to one of the apartments, and stole away into trashed packed gutters between structures. The alarm sang until the rats in the garbage heaps filed from the sanctuaries of torn refuse bags, to the warm cracks up the walls of the apartment building.

          Ertha walked to the window, and pulled back the curtains. She barely heard the siren over the infant weeping over her shoulder. Warm fingers of apple reeking vomit reached down her collar. She scratched at the scabs on her face and let the curtains fall. The news anchor on tv muttered about a new zoo opening, but his voice fell mute against her shattering eardrums.

The bathwater ran. She took the baby to the tub, its clothes coated in hairballs and dust deposits. The water from the tap ran clear, but once inside it ingested the rings of sand grain and bug corpses where it turned to a melange of buttery ripples. She held the baby facedown and knelt besides the edge when the door burst against the pile of kitchen trash. Boots kicked through milk jugs and dirty clothes, someone called her by name. She left the infant on the floor, and peeked beyond the door to her heartbound swain. She felt a moment of relief in that he came home instead of running away and leaving her with the child, but she saw the blood dripping from his ear and the bridge of his nose broken inwards. He held a strand of his own greasy hair in one hand, reddened flesh cooked on a bald spot between his bangs.

          She sat in the doorway nursing her neck scabs. “Did you get into a fight?”

          “yes...” He lost his balance and rolled onto the floor besides Ertha. He held his lump of hair for her to see, pinching one firm strand as the locks peeled to the floor, revealing a rope of rat tail. “I went to deliver some bootlegs, but your car- when I got to it the wheels were gone, the stereo gone, the money I made- all of it, gone.”

        “Ian, how could-”

         “This bum comes up to me. I smell him before I hear him. You know how rice socks smell? I recognized him from that show on Alaska where the guy got torn apart by bears- it was him! He looked awful. He handed me this, and told me it would solve both our problems, then disappeared.”

Ertha placed her elbow on his chest and pinned him to the fuzz coated floorboards. “You’re a liar.”

“Yes, maybe I am- but I’m not lying about this” He held the tail firm. “Let me up and I’ll show you.”

The infant screamed against the tile. Ertha shut the door on the child, and followed Ian to the microwave on the counter. He placed the tail inside, and opened the kitchen sink. A wet rat scampered out, crawled up a kitchen towel to the counter, where it went into the microwave. Ertha bit her fist in disgust. Ian held her by the shoulder, “watch, watch.” One more rat came out, then another followed by two, followed by three and they all clustered around the rat tail and squeaked not like rodents with food, but as bending wood, in unified chorus. Ian shut the microwave and tossed it out the window.

                “You always wanted to move away, right?” he asked her as the microwaved crashed. The wounds on his head provided a sharp glee that he never before expressed. “Once that baby is gone, we can…”

              “I thought you wanted to stay here-”

               “I hate this city. I hate this building. I hate the people. And no one will find out.”

                The baby pounded against the bathroom door, hiccuping its tears into silence.

             “Things will be back to the way they were.” She nodded. “Remember when we dreamt of running away together? To someplace romantic like West Virginia?”

             “It’s not a dream…” he held her by the cheeks, smearing his blood into the acne scars. “We’ll come back when the weekend’s over. No one will know. It’s just a freak accident.”

             The vandal tore the rag from his face and he entered the building through the front door latch with a bolt that came unscrewed from the door frame. He counted the stairs and the doors until he stood where the key matched the address. The lock snapped, and he crept inside. A pair of hands saluted like mantis blades from under a layer of quilts. The fabrics lifted with breathing beneath someone sleeping on cushions under the window light. He pulled the cover away, revealing features peeling from the shell of a mannequin. The mannequin moaned in pain. The vandal took it by the neck and squeezed until the insignia painted over its pupils faded. The chest stopped breathing and the raw flesh withered to gray wands and shedded to the floor. The vandal crept around the dark apartment until he found a room of limbs and torsos boxed up before iron stands. All other rooms remained empty but for mites nestled in the carpets and the rats scampering in the pipes.

              The vandal locked the door, and lay besides the lifeless mannequin. He hummed a song from the island he grew up on inspired by a great wave that washed many of the inhabitants away. The idols etched into stones and trees flooded his mind when he shut his eyes and scared sleep away. He lifted his head into the street lights beaming through the window. He touched the glass and looked down at the city. The condensation chilled the burns on his fingers and palms. Once numb, he sat in the dark, and waited for sleep to suppress his imagination, but the patter of thin nails scrapping in the ducts probed his attention. Upstairs, he sighed, a baby screamed and screamed. Not mere crying, but sabor slashes of vocal straint like he never heard from a child before- only from defeathered hens. He wondered if perhaps he mistook the cries for that of an exotic bird trapped in a cage suspended above a cluster of starving alley cats. No, he admitted to himself, sounds just...

In his lost youth studying great apes hidden in gloomy valleys of Salonga Sud he witnessed several patterns and behaviors of rare white primates living deep in the jungle. They hunted in packs, not for meat, but for living rodents to imprison in a hollow tree for reasons he determined to discover.

Any ape born under a new moon, he witnessed, become an object of fury. Once born, the rodents in the tree vaporized and the tree glowed red like burning coals. The dominant hunter took the infant ape and carried it to the tree tops, bit its face until the skull caved in, then shared the meat among lesser hunters, leaving scraps in the higher branches for the orphan apes, and to surprise of the vandal- even the mothers indulged by licking the blood from its bones.  

Once the tree glowed red and the rats turned to smoke, the apes sharpened branches to spears, and hurled them at birds and bats, killing small monkeys, devouring any meat obtainable. They used thread from strips of broken branches to fasten rocks to staffs to crack nuts. The apes began constructing ladders from vines, wheels from mud, and sewing feathers together into coats, and fur into covers- until the glowing at last seceded, and ashy smoke emanating from vents in the trunk fell back to the ground. In the morning, they’d be clacking rocks and eating ants.

The vandal snuck away from the tents of other researchers, and wandered under dark to the territory of apes while the hunters patrolled the valley boundaries. At the bottom of the tree he found toothpick bones and ash dust, yet the pulp of the tree remained unscorched. He dug his hand in deeper, until he found a source of air sucking the dust down a series of slots. He traced one slot with his finger, struggling in the ash, ash up to his elbow, and found tiny elastic tongues prodding his finger tips and propelling it below.

When the forest began to shake he looked back to the vines and fog. He climbed inside the hallowed tree. Then he listened furious apes screech at each other until an ancient hominid stood amongst them. They calmed as he showed them a club f fossilized lumber, and the skull of an ape. In one precise blow the cranium, the skull fractured. The elder then distributed a fragment to each ape. They used them draw a circle around the tree. Once complete, the jungle started to rain- yet no moisture fell from the gathering mounts of rolling cloud. Instead a carpet of rodents assembled within the circle. The apes lost themselves in a storm of clubbing and gnawing, capturing the rats and hurling them dead or crippled into the hollowed tree where they scratched the vandals face, nibbled his earlobes, and slid into his clothes where they tore free with long incisors. They reeked of wet fur and murky caverns.

Claws grasped his lips and eyelids. The vandal tried to escape but anytime he rose out the dominant hunter pushed him back in. He threw a rat at the ape, and slid his body out before the ape raised a spear, hurled it, and impaled him. The ape tore the spear free, and dropped the bleeding body to the bottom with the rats. The vandal smelled only burning hair and felt the rats in his shirt and pant legs breaking apart and pouring down the tears in his clothing. The dust of their combusting bodies jammed his lungs and he choked, prying the primitive spearhead free, his fingers slippery with blood gummed with powder, reaching for the way out. The rats baked in his hands, over his mouth, and scorched fingers, lips, and eyelids.

He thought himself dead until the sun rose back. He crawled from the tree, gasping from his suffering condition, and feared the apes returning and discovering him- but the apes no longer froliced around painted ring. Only balls of white hair floating in gusts between bone stacks remained.

The vandal never again lived among primates but apes echoed in his thoughts in every waking hour. He meditated hard on the crying he heard- “it is the past echoing to me, or perhaps, even, my mind is at last sunken to impassible depths…”  He held the mannequin to him. When the head rolled from its shoulders, he saw the head of a rat poke out from the neck and hiss at him. He dropped the hallow human- and a flock of rats fled from the neck into a crack between the wall and floor, then crawled up to the floor above. The vandal stood. “Whether indeed corrupt illusion from the jungles, or naught other than myne own delusion, these unraveling walls beckon me…”

He climbed out the window. The odor of a dumpster rusted through reached through the grate he stood on. The buzzsaws of traffic and constant construction foamed over the cityscape even at night. Taking hold of the fire escape, the vandal climbed up the ladder to the apartment above his. He no longer heard baby cries, but the squeaking and scampering of the rats remained through the window. He watched them perch on the crib rails as others hopped inside, other hopped out, a family of tails tangled together from between the bars writhed.

The vandal cut open the screen with a utility knife, then he peeled away rotting gaskets to expose the glass. He used the blade to slide under the glass where he pressed until the glass chipped. Rats gathered on the window sill and scratched at the source of air blowing in. The blade sliced their nails and noses, causing them to jump down into the garbage below. Once wide enough for his finger, he inserted a the claw side of his hammer and wrenched it against the glass.

Cracks reached up to the top then the glass fell to the pavement below in two halfs. The vandal coughed. The apartment reeked worse than any dumpster he dug through. He put everything back inside his coat, then he arched his leg over the window where his boot crunched against dirty clothes and styrofoam. Rats squeaked and scurried from under his boots, jumping through refuse into the silent crib. The vandal walked inside, his stomach dropping to his pelvis.

The smell colored the wallpaper and ceiling with gaseous smears. Two rats fought over a piece of meat. The dark within the crib squirmed like fish bait in soil. He heard the tender, wet juice drips of moaning rodents. He lowered the crib bars and reached inside. The rats bit at his hands but he felt no pain on his burned flesh. He swept them aside, but one bit onto his forearm and sunk its incisors in between the bones. The vandal grabbed the rat, and uttered a whisper repeated over and over by the haunting apes- and the rat shriveled up and shrunk like burned popcorn, smoke lifted from its eye sockets. The vandal scooped up the cold remnants from the crib. He carried it out the window with limp steps, disappearing behind the fluttering curtains back down to the vacated apartment, where he inspected the nibbled fingertips, and fleshless nose bridge- and drew a circle with its blood. He heard the apes hollar, and rats burn once more- he rose his hands to the dark and he felt the heat of the seething rodent bones - called to them in the name of the ancient idols, in the name of those swept into the ocean, as the shadows of apes danced with violence along the walls around him.

The police received a phone call from a person that wanted to remain unidentified. The had the landlord open the door for them, who gladly did- citing the occupants ceased rent payments and stopped picking up their mail. What they found they struggled to report that day. The apartment gleamed with clean finished floor and beaming walls. They entered the hall, following a source of cold air. The cold air came from under a door that neither officer nor the landlord could get to move. Then one door screeched open. Crumbled barricades fell into the hallway, and so the police slung inside. On the floor they found strips of clothing, and in the corner they found two adult skeletons huddled on the floor.  Nests of fat, twitching rats quietly snoozed on the floor around them.  

As the police and landlord discussed that they found, the vandal carried the infant’s bones with him to the new zoo in a case he retrieved from the empty apartment. One ape reached out at him from the cage bars. The vandal stood before the ape, looked into its bulking brow, and handed it the case. The ape revealed all of its teeth in smile, tore open the case in the corner of the cage, and nursed the dead infant. Security waited to stop the vandal at the gate before he left, but they never caught him leaving. The ape refused to surrender it’s cadaver to them.