In the old farm at this time of year, a quiet hung in
the rooms with rotting wood that sunk into the floors each time you stepped on them as if the house were mounted on a sponge. With each step, the rooms
would start whispering to each other, “Who’s there?” And “What was that in the
dining room? I heard a fork drop.” But no answer would come, and
they would be forced to resort to chattering nervously amongst themselves, until
once again a calm had settled into the silence where years had rotted away any
sense of what ought to take place in the event of some terrifying incident anyway, or even what one
might look like. All that came through this disorienting fog of nervousness was a single visceral notion, “This is
foreign”, and it was enough to twist at the ankles of a fleeing victim, or
grope and clutch at the stomach of someone who thought they were alive, only
to be pulled down to the bottom of the sea in a single gurgle, and then, once
again, the quiet would fill up all the rooms. In a distant room there was a nervous giggle, but it soon
gave way. The frost-filled winds outside the house were slowly clawing away at
the siding and paint that once marked the plot in a deep, bright yellow, now dulled
and flecked from being at the mercy of nature’s tremendous will, which was
something currently like a soft breath blowing into a teapot, only the house was at
the bottom of it, the tea nearly completely evaporated. Of course, from this far down, even the
lightest blowing would sound like a snowstorm is coming. The paint will continue
to peel, voices all murmuring that something dreadful is going to happen just
beyond some corner or doorway they could not see past. If only the whole house
were transparent! Of course, if there were no house at all there would be even
fewer problems, and fewer still with no one to live in it, but houses were
built to have problems, and to have loads of superstitions attached to them
besides.
“2, 3, 4” A voice would say, and time would pass, and only the snow piling up would clock the hours. “76, 77, 78…” Continued the voice in a low whisper. The boots by the door, knocked over as they were, were left with a glossy finish where snow had been to let the counter know that time was passing. Everything, the snow rising and melting like a slow tide, the paint slowly coming off in chips to be later eaten by squirrels and hares, the leaking roof, the dripping faucet, all were telling the man decidedly not counting seconds, what the time was. Only there was no translation, it was all spelled out in water; a persistent voice speaking a foreign language, as if there was something urgent, and Oh! If only the letters could be read by you! Some disaster might be avoided.
All around the house, books were pulled out, document which smelled like bread and wet leaves, pots, pans, suits, tools, ornate silverware, keepsakes that were not valuable and only ever looked at to decide whether or not they should be thrown out. All were weighed, counted, bitten, held up to the light to examine their exact transparency and density. Then, when the whole house could be fit into a ledger, the man turned inward to it to say his last goodbye and said something along the lines of “Might as well,” as if it were neither the beginning nor the ending to a sentence, and no one could be sure either if even this was exactly what he said; there is a great deal of uncertainty surrounding events which seem inconsequential at the time they are taking place.
Do you know what fear and boredom look like when they come together? It is difficult to describe and very possible that you would not think of it as anything special if you saw it in the face of a stranger, maybe because it is so rarely seen that we are not accustomed to reacting to it. You can imagine it though pretty easily as the sound you would make if you knew no one could hear you.
The snow was thick enough that the man’s footsteps through it might have been made through an open field, a road, a frozen pond, or the beginning of some construction site. It was impossible to tell without some form of context, and this, too, was disappearing in the blowing winds. The man’s car stood open and gradually began disappearing, as a distant memory. The pines called out to him, though they couldn’t seem to get their heads on straight about what his name was, so instead howled aimlessly. They tried casting off their own snow-filled films toward him to gain his attention, but nothing seemed to work. The man looked up at the sky, it was the same as the earth. He was trying to remember exactly where he had come from, but couldn’t help but think instead of the canned peaches he ate that morning, and the incredible darkness inside that house. This darkness, the exact nature of it, was playing on through the corners of his mind, obsessively, automatically. He wanted to know the exact quality of the change in light between the nameless and unfurnished room which separated the kitchen from the stairwell, and which had no windows; and the kitchen, which had all the brightness of Winter cascading inside so that you could see the shadow of the wind passing that told you you were whirring through space at unimaginable speeds. The man knelt down in the snow to watch. The crunch of it beneath his knee woke him for a moment, and he started to wonder where he was. Like before, but now, in sleep, the branches that held these thoughts together to let you know the precise distance between them and memories and pure nonsense were being torn apart, one by one, quietly but without mercy.
When he awoke, he was dead.
As he stood and brushed the snow still clinging to his shaking knees, his mind sought out only the most recent memories. The shadows of the windows were mixed with the smell of jams, footsteps into the white nothingness trailed off into the melody of some forgotten song. Even the car, left with it’s door open to the elements, was disappearing actually into the blankness of the distant past. In this distance, with nothing else to do, the trees blew off their dust like sand through the fingers of some clenched fist. He could see them, only barely, spotting the landscape in little pencil scratches, and the man started walking toward them. A mile, five or ten, they passed without so much as a thought, and he was soon groping along the edge of the trees for a way in. The forest was dark inside, and most of the snow seemed to have dried up when it touched the earth or else was trapped in the spider web network of branches that hung overhead and let the light poke through only here and there in short intervals. The melted snow wound and crisscrossed through the bed of the forest under thin sheets of transparent ice, and the man followed them, listening now in complete exhaustion only to the sharp sounds of his own breath and heartbeat cutting through the frost filled air, to the foot of a small wooden house with sticks and stones arranged as tools and tables all around the outside, scattered, it seemed, by some hair brained method for organization, and only lightly touched by the leaves and snow making patchworks on the earth below.
“2, 3, 4” A voice would say, and time would pass, and only the snow piling up would clock the hours. “76, 77, 78…” Continued the voice in a low whisper. The boots by the door, knocked over as they were, were left with a glossy finish where snow had been to let the counter know that time was passing. Everything, the snow rising and melting like a slow tide, the paint slowly coming off in chips to be later eaten by squirrels and hares, the leaking roof, the dripping faucet, all were telling the man decidedly not counting seconds, what the time was. Only there was no translation, it was all spelled out in water; a persistent voice speaking a foreign language, as if there was something urgent, and Oh! If only the letters could be read by you! Some disaster might be avoided.
All around the house, books were pulled out, document which smelled like bread and wet leaves, pots, pans, suits, tools, ornate silverware, keepsakes that were not valuable and only ever looked at to decide whether or not they should be thrown out. All were weighed, counted, bitten, held up to the light to examine their exact transparency and density. Then, when the whole house could be fit into a ledger, the man turned inward to it to say his last goodbye and said something along the lines of “Might as well,” as if it were neither the beginning nor the ending to a sentence, and no one could be sure either if even this was exactly what he said; there is a great deal of uncertainty surrounding events which seem inconsequential at the time they are taking place.
Do you know what fear and boredom look like when they come together? It is difficult to describe and very possible that you would not think of it as anything special if you saw it in the face of a stranger, maybe because it is so rarely seen that we are not accustomed to reacting to it. You can imagine it though pretty easily as the sound you would make if you knew no one could hear you.
The snow was thick enough that the man’s footsteps through it might have been made through an open field, a road, a frozen pond, or the beginning of some construction site. It was impossible to tell without some form of context, and this, too, was disappearing in the blowing winds. The man’s car stood open and gradually began disappearing, as a distant memory. The pines called out to him, though they couldn’t seem to get their heads on straight about what his name was, so instead howled aimlessly. They tried casting off their own snow-filled films toward him to gain his attention, but nothing seemed to work. The man looked up at the sky, it was the same as the earth. He was trying to remember exactly where he had come from, but couldn’t help but think instead of the canned peaches he ate that morning, and the incredible darkness inside that house. This darkness, the exact nature of it, was playing on through the corners of his mind, obsessively, automatically. He wanted to know the exact quality of the change in light between the nameless and unfurnished room which separated the kitchen from the stairwell, and which had no windows; and the kitchen, which had all the brightness of Winter cascading inside so that you could see the shadow of the wind passing that told you you were whirring through space at unimaginable speeds. The man knelt down in the snow to watch. The crunch of it beneath his knee woke him for a moment, and he started to wonder where he was. Like before, but now, in sleep, the branches that held these thoughts together to let you know the precise distance between them and memories and pure nonsense were being torn apart, one by one, quietly but without mercy.
When he awoke, he was dead.
As he stood and brushed the snow still clinging to his shaking knees, his mind sought out only the most recent memories. The shadows of the windows were mixed with the smell of jams, footsteps into the white nothingness trailed off into the melody of some forgotten song. Even the car, left with it’s door open to the elements, was disappearing actually into the blankness of the distant past. In this distance, with nothing else to do, the trees blew off their dust like sand through the fingers of some clenched fist. He could see them, only barely, spotting the landscape in little pencil scratches, and the man started walking toward them. A mile, five or ten, they passed without so much as a thought, and he was soon groping along the edge of the trees for a way in. The forest was dark inside, and most of the snow seemed to have dried up when it touched the earth or else was trapped in the spider web network of branches that hung overhead and let the light poke through only here and there in short intervals. The melted snow wound and crisscrossed through the bed of the forest under thin sheets of transparent ice, and the man followed them, listening now in complete exhaustion only to the sharp sounds of his own breath and heartbeat cutting through the frost filled air, to the foot of a small wooden house with sticks and stones arranged as tools and tables all around the outside, scattered, it seemed, by some hair brained method for organization, and only lightly touched by the leaves and snow making patchworks on the earth below.
With a painful creak, the door opened up a sliver
to show the house's small insides. With shaking hands and a racing heart, the man peered inside, not
knowing what to expect but only imagining himself, his eyes widening open under
the warped glass that plated the woven streams outside. How he might be carried
along, trapped like this, and who knows what type of person might hole
themselves up in such a place, surrounded only by wolves and darkness?
Still, the temptation was too great for an empty house this far out in the
wilderness, how all the food might be spoilt, but he could thumb through the
cupboards and dig his greedy fingers eagerly through marmalades and pickled
eggs, and Oh! The treasures that might be found and how they would be
appreciated by someone whose stomach was carved out like a pumpkin, feeling
just as bloated, with the sounds of shifting tectonic plates coming from
somewhere deep within. He listened closely. Slowly, from inside, he heard the
sounds of distant singing. The radio was on.
"Dog! Dog!" The old man's grizzled voice
rang out from one of the inner rooms of the house, now emerging into the hallway to be heard more clearly, "Master
Keats! Come let me rub my face against your warm Winter pelt." And here,
the dog was lifted up to it's hind legs, staggering in short, jittery steps as
he tried to support his muscular hot dog shaped body by short little stick
legs. He looked up eagerly into the old man's eyes as they waltzed around the
living area. This was obviously not the first time the dog had had to become
accustomed to this kind of exercise. "If you're going to dance with me,
the least you could do is wear a wig." The old man added finally after
several intimate moments, and reached to a nearby counter for an open box of
cereal, reaching inside and breaking apart several long pieces of wheat from
inside before sprinkling them lightly over the dog's head, who looked around
eagerly and confused at the falling strands of hair, barking into the quiet
house and nearly falling over in his excitement before finally regaining his
composure. He looked up eagerly into his Master's eyes, searching them only for
some kind of approval, but the master only looked down woefully and solemnly as
he stepped slowly into the first movement of what seemed like a more calculated
and dignified dance. Despite this solemnity though, and the scrutinizing gaze
he shot downwards towards the beast, it was the old man himself who eventually
knocked his hips into a nearby shelf and knocked over a small container of
washers and bolts while the clumsy dog, seeing his opportunity to break free of
his silent prison, barked and ran off into a nearby room. "Shit! Are you
gonna close that door, or do you want the whole world looking in to see what a
mess it is in here?" The old man very slowly and painstakingly brought
himself down far enough that he could reach the floor, supporting himself on
furniture of decreasing heights as time went on in some very elaborate display
as he picked up each small piece of metal, one by one, and put them back into
the plastic bin.
____________________________________________________________________________
“Shh! Shh! Where’s your sister?”
“I don’t know. Why do you keep asking me?”
“Shush. Stop biting your lip when you talk and don’t give me an attitude whenever I ask you a question.”
“Come on! Hurry!”
The two rats shuffled eagerly across the countertop, touching their noses to the surface with each step and taking extra care not to let the light from the window glisten on their silver coats, as it was still dark inside.
“You were with her last night. I heard you two laughing in the cupboards.”
“I went to bed when she was still looking for food. I thought she came to bed too, but maybe she got lost.”
The old man had left to go search for the rabbits caught in his snares, but they knew that even though the first light had only just poked its nose shyly indoors, he would be back before it glowed with any confidence. One of the rats was chewing on the wall beside the sink while the other tested a broken stick nearby that was leaning against the edge of the counter. We should call these mice something to avoid confusions though, even though they do not know each other by names, don’t you think? Just for our convenience, in other words. Henrietta called out to Elizabeth, who had only just breached the surface of the drywall anyway, and was staring at her while she prodded and pushed the stick, which did not budge. The two communed at the edge of the counter with their noses raised high in the air so that they could maintain eye contact, before Henrietta broke off and made a running start down the stick. Elizabeth soon followed, but after the first step, the whole block of wood started shifting forward at the bottom. It was sliding out from under them! By the time it broke contact with the counter, the two had instinctively jumped. Elizabeth found herself quite high up and free falling, but given to her small frame and well-timed roll, she was able to escape the fall with nothing injured but her nerves.
“It’s all about roads, huh?” Came a voice from the darkness.
The two merely stood still with quickly beating hearts.
“What I mean is, you sacrificed the hole for a quick way down, when the hole could have been a quick and safe way to always go up there. But I guess if your stomach is empty it doesn’t really matter.” Another rat had appeared. This one was quite scrawny and scrappy, with a small bald spot on its side from where it had recently cut itself (probably from falling into the sink).
“You were watching us?” Elizabeth had dropped her guard slightly and was sniffing behind her mother for her next meal.
“I saw you. That’s not the same as watching, exactly.”
“How are they different?”
“Well, one sounds worse, for one thing.”
Henrietta was distracted somewhat and staring off into the distance for what she thought were the sounds of footsteps, but soon found herself and chimed in.
“Have you seen someone who smells like us? Another rat?
She was out last night but we can’t seem to find her.”
“Another rat?”
“Yes.”
“Well, there are a lot of us around here, you know.”
“I know… Can you help us or not? What do you want, food? Do you know anything?”
“No, Ms. I would never accept food for such a thing. If I knew where your person was, I’d tell you, I promise.”
“Okay, let’s go.” The two rats started shuffling away, but not before Henrietta sent an absent-minded “Thank you” behind her.
“Well if we’re going to look for her, we have to hurry. No more hobbling about, we can think about food tonight. Besides, I know you ate like a pig when you got out last night.”
“I did not. And she’ll be fine, she’s probably waiting at home for us now, stewing because we left without her.”
“Don’t take this lightly when I say it’s serious.”
The words seemed to be cut short. Henrietta stared at Elizabeth with an obsessive and nameless thought flickering in her eyes and jumbling the words in her throat. Deep in her subconscious, far away from her reach, the words would have formed, “Remember what happened to your father.” But they did not and could not any more. The memories had all dissolved, and all that remained was the way she started thinking of the world at the time when they were burning brightly through her, so that when she thought of the world in these ways, she thought of him completely and not at all. The world was changing before her eyes, and these thoughts would always be encrypted, indecipherable in their prison, but somehow burned through her brightly enough in that moment that they silently reached out and screwed Elizabeth’s mouth up into a brief but painful grimace before the confused images could even be transplanted to her own mind. They travelled the rest of the way in a thick, syrupy silence, until they were caught up with again by the talkative rat.
“You know,” said the voice from nowhere again.
“Now that I think of it, there was something else.”
Despite their great reluctance, each of them, to wade back to the surface just to see what was causing such ripples, the bait was too tempting to ignore.
“Well don’t just stop there. You have us where you want us, don’t you? You can consider me in suspense already.”
“It’s not that. It’s probably nothing and I don’t want to scare you, but I thought I should mention it.”
“Well mention it then.”
“Okay. I saw something.” Here, the third rat slithered in in front of them, poised as if to share a secret, though they were the only ones around.
“Another rat, he found a hole. This rat, he looks like he has been here a long time. I don’t know for sure, as I have only been born relatively recently, but he looks comfortable, like the whole house is his. Comfortable and menacing.”
Henrietta and Elizabeth here shot each other a knowing glance (but of course quickly broke away so that Elizabeth could start gnawing at her armpit while Henrietta waved her nose high in the air to start sniffing out changes in the room around her).
“Anyway,” he went on, “This hole appeared out of nowhere, or this is what the old rat’s sudden fascination told me, I saw this using my gut when I looked at him, and I had never seen it before either. Something must have been tempting inside though. He went in to have a look, and the hole… I don’t know how to describe this next part exactly, but the hole rose straight into the air! And after this, it disappeared altogether. I did not want to get too close, but I could hear this old rat still inside. He did not get far. After that, I could see the whole black tunnel he was in move up and down, like he was trapped in a bowl balanced on a carrot.”
“Are you sure that dumb old rat didn’t just get eaten by a bird?” Offered Elizabeth
“No no no, it was nothing like this-“
“Why are you bothering us? Did you just get bored looking for breakfast? Why have you spun such a long and elaborate tale?” Asked Henrietta, in a great fatigue.
“It’s true! I can show you… There’s something bad happening in this house. I can feel it.”
“Okay, Mr. Wizard-Psychic, where’s the magic hole then? And how are you going to show us something that’s disappeared?”
“Follow me…”
The three of them, each in turn, pressed their bodies low towards the floorboards and squeezed beneath a small space beneath the baseboards. In past the wood, the plaster and drywall were much more thoroughly chewed out, leaving only a thin façade (for appearances). There was no light in places like this, only cramped tunnels leading through insulation, small enough that a straw could fit through quite comfortable, but only serving as a compass point now for creatures passing in it. Every now and then, the cold arm of a copper pipe would reach out to touch them, clumsily, a broken bone emerging through the fur that they were passing through, and the path would suddenly veer off. Other times, the flesh of an exposed wire would appear before them, frayed and reaching out with long tendrils to greet passersby with the stench of death appearing also alongside it.
“Don’t touch that.” The voice up ahead would say.
“Don’t tell us what to do!” Cried Elizabeth.
“Shh. Did you make all these tunnels, Front-Rat?” Asked Henrietta.
“Yes.” Said the voice in front as the trail ahead branched off in three directions, “Most of them. I am the only one who knows my way through all of them. They are longer than they have to be so that people using these tunnels without me will get lost.” The boy-rat touted proudly, “Some trails even lead to the big fire that warms the house.”
“It’s very impressive of you.”
“It’s why I have all these scratches on me. Not because I get into fights or anything.”
“Okay.”
Soon the insulation broke through to the open air, and a thin slit of light cut through the darkness, showing a sea of pink that they were now all sitting on, while above them, pipes clung to nothing, appearing from, and leading to, nowhere, while fragments of this light bounced off of them, all in slightly different ways, illuminating the night sky. The third rat ran quickly along a few carefully chosen pipes with practiced skill while the other two did their best to follow. Elizabeth overshot one of the higher pipes and had to start over though, and other two waited in borrowed suspense as she retraced her steps. They emerged through a small opening where the pipe that drained the washroom sink tunneled through the drywall. Here they fell to the floor and found a small, black, oblong box nestled in behind the waste bin.
Remember, remember that some things that do not ever seem to change only do so, only remain still from a moving reference point. Memories distilled to a single moment, a snapshot of the past, the still image of a face crystalized by years of renewed meditation are adorned each time with the slightly changed words to reflect the passing year. Every face becomes a self-portrait, eventually, with only rude honesty as a buffer to preserve it's true image.
“Do you remember? Ah! Hush dog—barking! Barking! There’s nothing ever here. We are always alone and you yell at nothing! To no one. What is it for?”
The dog was too excited to simply sit still for such a lecture. Even in the small barracks that barely kept the wailing elements at bay, the outdoors were like the breath of life itself to such a creature. The forest was chattering loudly as we went deeper into it. I was still trying to clean off the first rabbit we came across, but it was all coming off in clumps and patches.
“The room in the back. The room in the back of that house we never bothered to clean out. It just wasn’t worth the effort! Hear that, Lord Kelvin? Some things are just not worth the work. There is so little time in a day, so few days in an hour! Yet let’s talk and talk and talk about it, like we have all the time in the world. Can you feel it, Master?” The old man picked a branch with the leaves still attached and rattled them as he chased the dog, now weaving infinity symbols through the trees. “All the time is passing.”
I could hear something heavy nearby suddenly lift itself from the braches above us. The birds were all screaming at each other, and I held the stick I had picked up closely in my hands, as the forest seemed ready to collapse in on us, or to, at the very least, send an owl or something down to give us a start, but nothing ever came. The old man was walking up the path and every now and then reaching in blindly, his nose still waving high in the air as he prodded some nondescript bush to pull out a rabbit tangled in string.
“And you were terrified. Of everything! Sockets and pots with the handles sticking out, glass coffee tables, empty swimming pools, full swimming pools. Mostly of that car though. Do you remember it?” Here he carefully maneuvered his hand through the thicket to pull out a frightened and still-living hare, twisting its neck with practiced efficiency as the creature first screwed itself up and started peddling the air below it anxiously with its feet before falling softly into the man’s hand. “Yeah, the one in the back in that big field that opened up to the forest, the one with the train tracks that passed through it. That rusty, old, abandoned car. You were terrified that they were going to play in it and get tetanus, or find some opium or something stashed away in the glove compartment or under the seats.” Into the deep brown bag the hare would go, to lay with its companions, “No, you remember it. You were telling me about the broken stove in the house just last week. It’s the same house. Just shush and listen. You will remember.”
When the forest opened up to the main part of the valley, you could see all of the trees suddenly rushing inward, down toward the bottom, before being stopped abruptly by a large body of water, the extents of which spread out to a nearly unimaginable distance, flattening everything in its path. The great equalizer, it was quite the marvel for something that amounted to little more than a bowl of water. A black cloud hovered in from the perimeter, toward us, below us, like a great creature stalking a prey it was unaware had already escaped high above it, into the trees, to watch it safely as it passed.
“What is that?”
“Just a cloud.” The old man looked annoyed for having been interrupted.
“Well they didn’t heed your warnings anyway. All those times you would line them up and tell them, ‘You can go play out in the yard up to the trees, but if I see one of you even go near that car, you’re going to be grounded for a month.’” We stepped right down into the black cloud as it was passing, as though we were coming down to mount it, our feet covered now in ash and tar. “It wasn’t enough, obviously. You know how kids get, you tell them they can’t do something and it becomes the Taj Mahal of things to do. The Grand Prix. The Amazon jungle. I probably wasn’t the greatest influence, so long as we’re all being honest here. Maybe I wanted them to like me a little more. Didn’t work in the end, but for a while it was a pretty good method.” The old man paused on the hill, in reflection, but also trying to recapture the breath the smoke had just stolen. “Christ! It’s like living with you all over again.” He yelled out to the forest between dry heaves before retracing his steps to pick up the thought where he had last placed it.
At the bottom of the valley, with the lake now partially eclipsed, the old man kicked around the grey dirt looking for the oars he had buried, blinded by darkness, while the distant ends of the water, where fish still swam, shimmered brilliantly without somehow illuminating any of the earth or water below the cloud. Eventually we found them, but not without some difficulty, as they were nestled in behind a small bush rather discreetly and covered in an ashen brown cloth. We both got in a small rowboat resting on the shore and rowed along the river in silence, the waves gently lifting and lowering the ship towards the distant shore. “Anyway” The man went on, “My point was that I caught them before you did, that’s all.” The lake was amazingly quiet when the man stopped speaking, and when we reached the daylight of the distant shore, we dismounted almost immediately onto a small corner shop at the end of a dirt road. The old man went inside and bought some cigarettes before quietly cursing out the shop owner, as was his custom.
When the old man returned to the boat, his boredom had returned to him, and he went on. “I found this ratty old pair of boots in the room full of garbage that the last tenants had left. They were torn up and you could smell them on the other side of a closed door. Absolutely rancid. Anyway, I knew they had figured out how long it took you to make tea or food before you went up to your room, and they would wait before sitting in this abandoned car and pretending to drive it.” The forest left behind on the other end of the valley, the distant shore, was now bursting into flames, having immolated in on itself, and the small boat swam toward it uneasily, the old man idly picking away at his cigarettes and dropping bits of them into the water as he lied back against his pack inside the boat. “So one day before the kids woke up, I put the boots in the driver’s side below the seat, with a note on top of them that read ‘Back in 15’. The look on their faces when they came screaming back inside... I think in the end they were more afraid of you when they saw they had woken you up though.”
The rats stared at the small black box that sat quietly before them with a sort of anxious amusement. What was it? Was it dangerous? Why wasn’t the rat inside saying anything? It was apparent that there was another one of them living inside, so this part of the boy-rat’s story was true. The rat inside was probably plotting something in all of his silence, he and the clever little one that had brought them there were probably in on it together. Only, well, the smell of prolonged nervousness was at least a little comforting. Elizabeth had planted herself on top of the box and was chewing away at one of the corners when Henrietta looked up, and, seeing this, leapt in place.
“Elizabeth! What are you doing?”
“Nothing.” Elizabeth shook in sudden fear from being startled, but quickly resumed. “I want to see what’s inside.”
“A dangerous rat is what. Get down from there! Don’t just start opening a mystery box without even thinking about what’s in it.”
From inside, a small voice trickled into the sounds of chastisement, only a whisper at first, but soon growing in confidence. “H-hello?” A typical timid introduction for a meek little rat only looking for the right moment to lunge out and start madly chewing out their bellies. “Who is it? What do you want?” Henrietta called out half-heartedly to the black plastic cube. “Please help me… Can you help me?” And, after a moment without any response, the voice cried out quietly again, “I’m so scared. What’s going to happen to me?”
The small rat with the cut on his side spoke first, “I don’t know if I trust him. He did not seem so gentle when he first went in there.”
Henrietta was second, “Even if I thought it was okay, there’s just no time! We have to find my daughter before it gets too bright.”
Then Elizabeth, who tried to mumble something, but whose mouth was too full of plastic to form the words, simply nodded. The corner of the box soon had a fracture large enough for the big rat to poke through, now gnawing down one of the cracks in the plastic himself in a sort of panicked frenzy, before emerging outright. His eyelids were chapped and he made a darting motion towards Elizabeth, who was closest, his long teeth opening up with a mechanical precision and eagerness, before the boy-rat rushed in from the side to bit the much larger rat’s thigh. In the excitement, Henrietta and Elizabeth managed to quickly scurry up a mound of toilet paper that led back to the hole under the pipe. They made their escape, it seemed, but seemed also always to hear a shuffling in the insulation just behind them. They would call out to it, but there was never any answer. Elizabeth was quietly sobbing. Henrietta was sure after only a few minutes into the cavern passages that the scent of the three of them tunneling only ten minutes earlier was disappearing completely in front of her now, but she was also sure that there were no turns she could have even chosen poorly on the path back so far. Besides, it was too late to go back now anyway. They would just have to see where this path took them.
“Are we going to get lost here?” The words rolled over the slobber and snot of outright sobbing in the small crawlspace that was coming to an end in front of Henrietta.
“Shh.” The voice was quickly hushed.
“But mom…” The cries continued.
“Can you not see I’m busy Elizabeth?! What? What is so urgent that it can’t wait five seconds until we’re out in the hallway again?”
A brief silence.
“What? Tell me. You finally have my attention.”
“I don’t know. It’s—I don’t know.” And still the slobbering wouldn’t stop. It was audibly drizzled over each word and filled in all the silences between them.
“Well great then, Elizabeth. I’m glad we stopped to discuss this in the tunnels while we wait for whatever it is out there to come in and eat us. Are you happy we paused here to have this conversation? Maybe we can have another one while we’re relaxing here in the shade, like what we’re having for dinner, or what you feel like doing during the Summer. Hmm? What do you think?”
Still no answer, but the two started travelling backwards to retrace their footsteps as Henrietta got increasingly angry.
“Don’t just sit there in silence after I ask you a direct question. What do you want? Did you suddenly forget how to speak?”
“Nothing. Just keep going.”
“Don’t get an attitude with me Elizabeth, and don’t tell me what to do.”
“Well?”
“I don’t know what you want me to say.”
Just then, as they were following the small opening they had somehow missed the first time down, a loud squeak could be heard through the walls. It was her. The voice was so close, and the path leading to it so far, Henrietta had to fight every bone in her body just to stop herself from veering off to the side and chewing toward the sound, but she knew in the reasoning part of her mind that this was the longer way in time, even if it was shorter in distance. The two mice raced in the darkness, chasing the tail of their own scent mixed with sawdust and formaldehyde down through winding tunnels that seemed absolutely familiar in one moment only to fade into the completely alien the next. Finally they came to the chewed up wire they had passed on the way in and all hope was rekindled.
In the hall, the great dog, fifty miles tall, was bearing it’s teeth like a gated fence to a mouse that was awkwardly meandering past it as though it had not just been bitten, and there was, in fact, no real threat. ‘Arf!’ Cried the idiot-monster to the whole house, for no reason whatsoever.
“Rachel!” Henrietta lunged at the beast from behind, narrowly escaping the giant snapping jaws immediately pointed towards her and running across the thing’s spine as the creature bit wildly at its own tail, the wet sound of teeth clamping together filling the quiet of the house. She launched off and landed only a few paces in front of her daughter, who, taking a cue from the sprinting figure in front of her, took off herself until the two had made it to safety. The dog, left in a wild daze from biting circles in the air, soon caught hold of it’s senses long enough to set its sights on Elizabeth, who had been left to her own devices in the otherwise now empty room. The beast scratched its long nails against the hardwood floor several times before picking up any traction. Not a tremendous delay, but it was enough for Elizabeth to squeeze and shake herself into the slit under the baseboards, though she could feel the breath on her back on the way, and still hear it breathing long after.
“Elizabeth, stay there and don’t come out until I say. You’re safe there for now.” Came the voice from the other side of the wall.
“You left me!” Came the voice from the solitary innards.
“Sorry! I had to save Rachel. I wasn’t thinking.”
At nightfall, all three mice had made it safely back to the cupboards. Henrietta wanted to sleep, she wanted to let the waves of peace from a reunited family gently wash over her until her eyelids were too heavy to lift through any act of sheer will, but something would not let her. Some nameless something chewed at the insides of her ears and whispered sweet nothings into them. This something, she slowly discovered as the hours all stumbled into each other, came from the voice of the small, beat-up rat. She couldn’t remember the words exactly, but the gist of it was that the house was no longer safe, that something was changing. Even the man that lived there with them was beginning to act somewhat funny lately. As she thought of this, the hours passed on and eventually gave way to sleep.
The next few days passed in relative peace, and Rachel was a great help through them, as she went out into the kitchen at night while Henrietta dwelt upon an escape plan for Spring, and Elizabeth kept to her room, embarrassed about the small patches of fur she was losing. It would go like this. In the evening when all the rooms were suddenly, finally, saturated in the smoke of the burning trees outside, a small voice would nuzzle itself into persistent rat dreams.
“Elizabeth,” the voice would say, but to no response as the girl still had to wade her way to the surface.
“Elizabeth, we have to go now, okay?”
“I do not want to go. I absolutely do not care about what the consequences of going or not going are, as staying here is the goal in and of itself.”
After being pulled out of her little hole in the wall forcibly, Elizabeth and her family were soon following the trail of rats rushing to leave the house. She caught a single image through the smoke and hollering, unbelievable and unmistakable even in the light of a single flame’s flicker (now breaking through the kitchen window to come inside, a thief in the night). It was her father. There is no part of this that is possible to describe adequately in words, though one must try in situations such as these, where it is equally impossible not to describe it at all. By proxy, you might imagine it as the mountains suddenly sprouting eyes and speaking to you, or, being lost in the vastness of space, to be able to see, in close, the scale and magnitude of the storm on Jupiter. He looked frail, as though he was turning to dust inside, with sunken cheeks and a thin white coat.
We all met him while he was in a state of dazed recognition, smiling politely, though with a look of deep confusion seemingly permanently affixed to his expression, just below the surface. There was hardly any time for all of this of course, keep in mind that the whole world is crumbling around us. We raced through the forest with an immense heat at our backs. Those that could not keep up were intentionally crawled over or kicked backwards, as though the flames were some wild beasts that could be slowed down and satiated through sacrifice. Across a small stream, the forest opened up to an empty field, and in it, a small alcove that almost fit all of the rats that were ambling on top of one another just to stay within its confines. The fire never quite reached this far though, and the rats felt quite safe in their new home, some of them even took to burrowing deeper in order to expand it.
By the morning, all was calm. Water trickled down from icicles and sparkled in the light of dawn as song birds hopped along the thawing earth, careful to avoid the scurrying rats, all in a mad rush to find food. Henrietta was looking out over the great expanse when another rat rested its head across her shoulders, “We would like some grass and branches to cover up this place, can you go find some?”
She would slip out to weave carefully through patches of long grass, keeping her eye frantically chasing the wind that swept through and kept the world around her in a constant state of change. There would be no other adventures for the day though, now creeping beasts chasing them all down burrowed tunnels. When she returned, it was as an electric current had been passed through the whole colony. Through all the chatter, a sudden burst of hysterical laughter could be heard here and there, but it would often quickly dissolve into violent and panicked outbursts, which also seemed to end as abruptly as they began. Elizabeth seemed to be still gazing off into the distance waiting for Henrietta’s return.
“He left you, you know.”
Someone called out indignantly to the rat who had said it, urging her to keep quiet, but instead it had the effect of quieting the whole audience, except for a few remaining squeals, misplaced remnants of the dying commotion. All were waiting for a spectacle. “To start a family.” The rat continued, now jeered on by the crowd. The old, thinning rat looked up and smiled politely at Henrietta from his slumped sitting position when he saw that she was looking at him. “Why else would he pretend like he did and then disappear indefinitely? Think about it reasonably.” The audience was in a loud commotion by this point, rolling over each other and laughing out in drunken fits from the disconnected stories they had been telling each other in the excited silence that had only just collapsed. This scene too could only hold for so long though before giving way to something new. The rats started scurrying in every direction, except for the one with the polite smile plastered on his face, who was soon nestled tightly in the talons of a great hawk, pulled in itself by the clamour of the crowd. When it had left, when the rats started trickling back into the small alcove, they all stared up at the sky in astonishment, as if the wrath of God had suddenly come down to wash the Earth clean. There was hushed gossip among friends, but as more people came, and more knew each other, connecting the groups, one by one, this quiet lull of voices soon grew into an uproarious and deafening chatter. A single voice that could not wait to see what the new day would bring.
____________________________________________________________________________
“Shh! Shh! Where’s your sister?”
“I don’t know. Why do you keep asking me?”
“Shush. Stop biting your lip when you talk and don’t give me an attitude whenever I ask you a question.”
“Come on! Hurry!”
The two rats shuffled eagerly across the countertop, touching their noses to the surface with each step and taking extra care not to let the light from the window glisten on their silver coats, as it was still dark inside.
“You were with her last night. I heard you two laughing in the cupboards.”
“I went to bed when she was still looking for food. I thought she came to bed too, but maybe she got lost.”
The old man had left to go search for the rabbits caught in his snares, but they knew that even though the first light had only just poked its nose shyly indoors, he would be back before it glowed with any confidence. One of the rats was chewing on the wall beside the sink while the other tested a broken stick nearby that was leaning against the edge of the counter. We should call these mice something to avoid confusions though, even though they do not know each other by names, don’t you think? Just for our convenience, in other words. Henrietta called out to Elizabeth, who had only just breached the surface of the drywall anyway, and was staring at her while she prodded and pushed the stick, which did not budge. The two communed at the edge of the counter with their noses raised high in the air so that they could maintain eye contact, before Henrietta broke off and made a running start down the stick. Elizabeth soon followed, but after the first step, the whole block of wood started shifting forward at the bottom. It was sliding out from under them! By the time it broke contact with the counter, the two had instinctively jumped. Elizabeth found herself quite high up and free falling, but given to her small frame and well-timed roll, she was able to escape the fall with nothing injured but her nerves.
“It’s all about roads, huh?” Came a voice from the darkness.
The two merely stood still with quickly beating hearts.
“What I mean is, you sacrificed the hole for a quick way down, when the hole could have been a quick and safe way to always go up there. But I guess if your stomach is empty it doesn’t really matter.” Another rat had appeared. This one was quite scrawny and scrappy, with a small bald spot on its side from where it had recently cut itself (probably from falling into the sink).
“You were watching us?” Elizabeth had dropped her guard slightly and was sniffing behind her mother for her next meal.
“I saw you. That’s not the same as watching, exactly.”
“How are they different?”
“Well, one sounds worse, for one thing.”
Henrietta was distracted somewhat and staring off into the distance for what she thought were the sounds of footsteps, but soon found herself and chimed in.
“Have you seen someone who smells like us? Another rat?
She was out last night but we can’t seem to find her.”
“Another rat?”
“Yes.”
“Well, there are a lot of us around here, you know.”
“I know… Can you help us or not? What do you want, food? Do you know anything?”
“No, Ms. I would never accept food for such a thing. If I knew where your person was, I’d tell you, I promise.”
“Okay, let’s go.” The two rats started shuffling away, but not before Henrietta sent an absent-minded “Thank you” behind her.
“Well if we’re going to look for her, we have to hurry. No more hobbling about, we can think about food tonight. Besides, I know you ate like a pig when you got out last night.”
“I did not. And she’ll be fine, she’s probably waiting at home for us now, stewing because we left without her.”
“Don’t take this lightly when I say it’s serious.”
The words seemed to be cut short. Henrietta stared at Elizabeth with an obsessive and nameless thought flickering in her eyes and jumbling the words in her throat. Deep in her subconscious, far away from her reach, the words would have formed, “Remember what happened to your father.” But they did not and could not any more. The memories had all dissolved, and all that remained was the way she started thinking of the world at the time when they were burning brightly through her, so that when she thought of the world in these ways, she thought of him completely and not at all. The world was changing before her eyes, and these thoughts would always be encrypted, indecipherable in their prison, but somehow burned through her brightly enough in that moment that they silently reached out and screwed Elizabeth’s mouth up into a brief but painful grimace before the confused images could even be transplanted to her own mind. They travelled the rest of the way in a thick, syrupy silence, until they were caught up with again by the talkative rat.
“You know,” said the voice from nowhere again.
“Now that I think of it, there was something else.”
Despite their great reluctance, each of them, to wade back to the surface just to see what was causing such ripples, the bait was too tempting to ignore.
“Well don’t just stop there. You have us where you want us, don’t you? You can consider me in suspense already.”
“It’s not that. It’s probably nothing and I don’t want to scare you, but I thought I should mention it.”
“Well mention it then.”
“Okay. I saw something.” Here, the third rat slithered in in front of them, poised as if to share a secret, though they were the only ones around.
“Another rat, he found a hole. This rat, he looks like he has been here a long time. I don’t know for sure, as I have only been born relatively recently, but he looks comfortable, like the whole house is his. Comfortable and menacing.”
Henrietta and Elizabeth here shot each other a knowing glance (but of course quickly broke away so that Elizabeth could start gnawing at her armpit while Henrietta waved her nose high in the air to start sniffing out changes in the room around her).
“Anyway,” he went on, “This hole appeared out of nowhere, or this is what the old rat’s sudden fascination told me, I saw this using my gut when I looked at him, and I had never seen it before either. Something must have been tempting inside though. He went in to have a look, and the hole… I don’t know how to describe this next part exactly, but the hole rose straight into the air! And after this, it disappeared altogether. I did not want to get too close, but I could hear this old rat still inside. He did not get far. After that, I could see the whole black tunnel he was in move up and down, like he was trapped in a bowl balanced on a carrot.”
“Are you sure that dumb old rat didn’t just get eaten by a bird?” Offered Elizabeth
“No no no, it was nothing like this-“
“Why are you bothering us? Did you just get bored looking for breakfast? Why have you spun such a long and elaborate tale?” Asked Henrietta, in a great fatigue.
“It’s true! I can show you… There’s something bad happening in this house. I can feel it.”
“Okay, Mr. Wizard-Psychic, where’s the magic hole then? And how are you going to show us something that’s disappeared?”
“Follow me…”
The three of them, each in turn, pressed their bodies low towards the floorboards and squeezed beneath a small space beneath the baseboards. In past the wood, the plaster and drywall were much more thoroughly chewed out, leaving only a thin façade (for appearances). There was no light in places like this, only cramped tunnels leading through insulation, small enough that a straw could fit through quite comfortable, but only serving as a compass point now for creatures passing in it. Every now and then, the cold arm of a copper pipe would reach out to touch them, clumsily, a broken bone emerging through the fur that they were passing through, and the path would suddenly veer off. Other times, the flesh of an exposed wire would appear before them, frayed and reaching out with long tendrils to greet passersby with the stench of death appearing also alongside it.
“Don’t touch that.” The voice up ahead would say.
“Don’t tell us what to do!” Cried Elizabeth.
“Shh. Did you make all these tunnels, Front-Rat?” Asked Henrietta.
“Yes.” Said the voice in front as the trail ahead branched off in three directions, “Most of them. I am the only one who knows my way through all of them. They are longer than they have to be so that people using these tunnels without me will get lost.” The boy-rat touted proudly, “Some trails even lead to the big fire that warms the house.”
“It’s very impressive of you.”
“It’s why I have all these scratches on me. Not because I get into fights or anything.”
“Okay.”
Soon the insulation broke through to the open air, and a thin slit of light cut through the darkness, showing a sea of pink that they were now all sitting on, while above them, pipes clung to nothing, appearing from, and leading to, nowhere, while fragments of this light bounced off of them, all in slightly different ways, illuminating the night sky. The third rat ran quickly along a few carefully chosen pipes with practiced skill while the other two did their best to follow. Elizabeth overshot one of the higher pipes and had to start over though, and other two waited in borrowed suspense as she retraced her steps. They emerged through a small opening where the pipe that drained the washroom sink tunneled through the drywall. Here they fell to the floor and found a small, black, oblong box nestled in behind the waste bin.
Remember, remember that some things that do not ever seem to change only do so, only remain still from a moving reference point. Memories distilled to a single moment, a snapshot of the past, the still image of a face crystalized by years of renewed meditation are adorned each time with the slightly changed words to reflect the passing year. Every face becomes a self-portrait, eventually, with only rude honesty as a buffer to preserve it's true image.
“Do you remember? Ah! Hush dog—barking! Barking! There’s nothing ever here. We are always alone and you yell at nothing! To no one. What is it for?”
The dog was too excited to simply sit still for such a lecture. Even in the small barracks that barely kept the wailing elements at bay, the outdoors were like the breath of life itself to such a creature. The forest was chattering loudly as we went deeper into it. I was still trying to clean off the first rabbit we came across, but it was all coming off in clumps and patches.
“The room in the back. The room in the back of that house we never bothered to clean out. It just wasn’t worth the effort! Hear that, Lord Kelvin? Some things are just not worth the work. There is so little time in a day, so few days in an hour! Yet let’s talk and talk and talk about it, like we have all the time in the world. Can you feel it, Master?” The old man picked a branch with the leaves still attached and rattled them as he chased the dog, now weaving infinity symbols through the trees. “All the time is passing.”
I could hear something heavy nearby suddenly lift itself from the braches above us. The birds were all screaming at each other, and I held the stick I had picked up closely in my hands, as the forest seemed ready to collapse in on us, or to, at the very least, send an owl or something down to give us a start, but nothing ever came. The old man was walking up the path and every now and then reaching in blindly, his nose still waving high in the air as he prodded some nondescript bush to pull out a rabbit tangled in string.
“And you were terrified. Of everything! Sockets and pots with the handles sticking out, glass coffee tables, empty swimming pools, full swimming pools. Mostly of that car though. Do you remember it?” Here he carefully maneuvered his hand through the thicket to pull out a frightened and still-living hare, twisting its neck with practiced efficiency as the creature first screwed itself up and started peddling the air below it anxiously with its feet before falling softly into the man’s hand. “Yeah, the one in the back in that big field that opened up to the forest, the one with the train tracks that passed through it. That rusty, old, abandoned car. You were terrified that they were going to play in it and get tetanus, or find some opium or something stashed away in the glove compartment or under the seats.” Into the deep brown bag the hare would go, to lay with its companions, “No, you remember it. You were telling me about the broken stove in the house just last week. It’s the same house. Just shush and listen. You will remember.”
When the forest opened up to the main part of the valley, you could see all of the trees suddenly rushing inward, down toward the bottom, before being stopped abruptly by a large body of water, the extents of which spread out to a nearly unimaginable distance, flattening everything in its path. The great equalizer, it was quite the marvel for something that amounted to little more than a bowl of water. A black cloud hovered in from the perimeter, toward us, below us, like a great creature stalking a prey it was unaware had already escaped high above it, into the trees, to watch it safely as it passed.
“What is that?”
“Just a cloud.” The old man looked annoyed for having been interrupted.
“Well they didn’t heed your warnings anyway. All those times you would line them up and tell them, ‘You can go play out in the yard up to the trees, but if I see one of you even go near that car, you’re going to be grounded for a month.’” We stepped right down into the black cloud as it was passing, as though we were coming down to mount it, our feet covered now in ash and tar. “It wasn’t enough, obviously. You know how kids get, you tell them they can’t do something and it becomes the Taj Mahal of things to do. The Grand Prix. The Amazon jungle. I probably wasn’t the greatest influence, so long as we’re all being honest here. Maybe I wanted them to like me a little more. Didn’t work in the end, but for a while it was a pretty good method.” The old man paused on the hill, in reflection, but also trying to recapture the breath the smoke had just stolen. “Christ! It’s like living with you all over again.” He yelled out to the forest between dry heaves before retracing his steps to pick up the thought where he had last placed it.
At the bottom of the valley, with the lake now partially eclipsed, the old man kicked around the grey dirt looking for the oars he had buried, blinded by darkness, while the distant ends of the water, where fish still swam, shimmered brilliantly without somehow illuminating any of the earth or water below the cloud. Eventually we found them, but not without some difficulty, as they were nestled in behind a small bush rather discreetly and covered in an ashen brown cloth. We both got in a small rowboat resting on the shore and rowed along the river in silence, the waves gently lifting and lowering the ship towards the distant shore. “Anyway” The man went on, “My point was that I caught them before you did, that’s all.” The lake was amazingly quiet when the man stopped speaking, and when we reached the daylight of the distant shore, we dismounted almost immediately onto a small corner shop at the end of a dirt road. The old man went inside and bought some cigarettes before quietly cursing out the shop owner, as was his custom.
When the old man returned to the boat, his boredom had returned to him, and he went on. “I found this ratty old pair of boots in the room full of garbage that the last tenants had left. They were torn up and you could smell them on the other side of a closed door. Absolutely rancid. Anyway, I knew they had figured out how long it took you to make tea or food before you went up to your room, and they would wait before sitting in this abandoned car and pretending to drive it.” The forest left behind on the other end of the valley, the distant shore, was now bursting into flames, having immolated in on itself, and the small boat swam toward it uneasily, the old man idly picking away at his cigarettes and dropping bits of them into the water as he lied back against his pack inside the boat. “So one day before the kids woke up, I put the boots in the driver’s side below the seat, with a note on top of them that read ‘Back in 15’. The look on their faces when they came screaming back inside... I think in the end they were more afraid of you when they saw they had woken you up though.”
The rats stared at the small black box that sat quietly before them with a sort of anxious amusement. What was it? Was it dangerous? Why wasn’t the rat inside saying anything? It was apparent that there was another one of them living inside, so this part of the boy-rat’s story was true. The rat inside was probably plotting something in all of his silence, he and the clever little one that had brought them there were probably in on it together. Only, well, the smell of prolonged nervousness was at least a little comforting. Elizabeth had planted herself on top of the box and was chewing away at one of the corners when Henrietta looked up, and, seeing this, leapt in place.
“Elizabeth! What are you doing?”
“Nothing.” Elizabeth shook in sudden fear from being startled, but quickly resumed. “I want to see what’s inside.”
“A dangerous rat is what. Get down from there! Don’t just start opening a mystery box without even thinking about what’s in it.”
From inside, a small voice trickled into the sounds of chastisement, only a whisper at first, but soon growing in confidence. “H-hello?” A typical timid introduction for a meek little rat only looking for the right moment to lunge out and start madly chewing out their bellies. “Who is it? What do you want?” Henrietta called out half-heartedly to the black plastic cube. “Please help me… Can you help me?” And, after a moment without any response, the voice cried out quietly again, “I’m so scared. What’s going to happen to me?”
The small rat with the cut on his side spoke first, “I don’t know if I trust him. He did not seem so gentle when he first went in there.”
Henrietta was second, “Even if I thought it was okay, there’s just no time! We have to find my daughter before it gets too bright.”
Then Elizabeth, who tried to mumble something, but whose mouth was too full of plastic to form the words, simply nodded. The corner of the box soon had a fracture large enough for the big rat to poke through, now gnawing down one of the cracks in the plastic himself in a sort of panicked frenzy, before emerging outright. His eyelids were chapped and he made a darting motion towards Elizabeth, who was closest, his long teeth opening up with a mechanical precision and eagerness, before the boy-rat rushed in from the side to bit the much larger rat’s thigh. In the excitement, Henrietta and Elizabeth managed to quickly scurry up a mound of toilet paper that led back to the hole under the pipe. They made their escape, it seemed, but seemed also always to hear a shuffling in the insulation just behind them. They would call out to it, but there was never any answer. Elizabeth was quietly sobbing. Henrietta was sure after only a few minutes into the cavern passages that the scent of the three of them tunneling only ten minutes earlier was disappearing completely in front of her now, but she was also sure that there were no turns she could have even chosen poorly on the path back so far. Besides, it was too late to go back now anyway. They would just have to see where this path took them.
“Are we going to get lost here?” The words rolled over the slobber and snot of outright sobbing in the small crawlspace that was coming to an end in front of Henrietta.
“Shh.” The voice was quickly hushed.
“But mom…” The cries continued.
“Can you not see I’m busy Elizabeth?! What? What is so urgent that it can’t wait five seconds until we’re out in the hallway again?”
A brief silence.
“What? Tell me. You finally have my attention.”
“I don’t know. It’s—I don’t know.” And still the slobbering wouldn’t stop. It was audibly drizzled over each word and filled in all the silences between them.
“Well great then, Elizabeth. I’m glad we stopped to discuss this in the tunnels while we wait for whatever it is out there to come in and eat us. Are you happy we paused here to have this conversation? Maybe we can have another one while we’re relaxing here in the shade, like what we’re having for dinner, or what you feel like doing during the Summer. Hmm? What do you think?”
Still no answer, but the two started travelling backwards to retrace their footsteps as Henrietta got increasingly angry.
“Don’t just sit there in silence after I ask you a direct question. What do you want? Did you suddenly forget how to speak?”
“Nothing. Just keep going.”
“Don’t get an attitude with me Elizabeth, and don’t tell me what to do.”
“Well?”
“I don’t know what you want me to say.”
Just then, as they were following the small opening they had somehow missed the first time down, a loud squeak could be heard through the walls. It was her. The voice was so close, and the path leading to it so far, Henrietta had to fight every bone in her body just to stop herself from veering off to the side and chewing toward the sound, but she knew in the reasoning part of her mind that this was the longer way in time, even if it was shorter in distance. The two mice raced in the darkness, chasing the tail of their own scent mixed with sawdust and formaldehyde down through winding tunnels that seemed absolutely familiar in one moment only to fade into the completely alien the next. Finally they came to the chewed up wire they had passed on the way in and all hope was rekindled.
In the hall, the great dog, fifty miles tall, was bearing it’s teeth like a gated fence to a mouse that was awkwardly meandering past it as though it had not just been bitten, and there was, in fact, no real threat. ‘Arf!’ Cried the idiot-monster to the whole house, for no reason whatsoever.
“Rachel!” Henrietta lunged at the beast from behind, narrowly escaping the giant snapping jaws immediately pointed towards her and running across the thing’s spine as the creature bit wildly at its own tail, the wet sound of teeth clamping together filling the quiet of the house. She launched off and landed only a few paces in front of her daughter, who, taking a cue from the sprinting figure in front of her, took off herself until the two had made it to safety. The dog, left in a wild daze from biting circles in the air, soon caught hold of it’s senses long enough to set its sights on Elizabeth, who had been left to her own devices in the otherwise now empty room. The beast scratched its long nails against the hardwood floor several times before picking up any traction. Not a tremendous delay, but it was enough for Elizabeth to squeeze and shake herself into the slit under the baseboards, though she could feel the breath on her back on the way, and still hear it breathing long after.
“Elizabeth, stay there and don’t come out until I say. You’re safe there for now.” Came the voice from the other side of the wall.
“You left me!” Came the voice from the solitary innards.
“Sorry! I had to save Rachel. I wasn’t thinking.”
At nightfall, all three mice had made it safely back to the cupboards. Henrietta wanted to sleep, she wanted to let the waves of peace from a reunited family gently wash over her until her eyelids were too heavy to lift through any act of sheer will, but something would not let her. Some nameless something chewed at the insides of her ears and whispered sweet nothings into them. This something, she slowly discovered as the hours all stumbled into each other, came from the voice of the small, beat-up rat. She couldn’t remember the words exactly, but the gist of it was that the house was no longer safe, that something was changing. Even the man that lived there with them was beginning to act somewhat funny lately. As she thought of this, the hours passed on and eventually gave way to sleep.
The next few days passed in relative peace, and Rachel was a great help through them, as she went out into the kitchen at night while Henrietta dwelt upon an escape plan for Spring, and Elizabeth kept to her room, embarrassed about the small patches of fur she was losing. It would go like this. In the evening when all the rooms were suddenly, finally, saturated in the smoke of the burning trees outside, a small voice would nuzzle itself into persistent rat dreams.
“Elizabeth,” the voice would say, but to no response as the girl still had to wade her way to the surface.
“Elizabeth, we have to go now, okay?”
“I do not want to go. I absolutely do not care about what the consequences of going or not going are, as staying here is the goal in and of itself.”
After being pulled out of her little hole in the wall forcibly, Elizabeth and her family were soon following the trail of rats rushing to leave the house. She caught a single image through the smoke and hollering, unbelievable and unmistakable even in the light of a single flame’s flicker (now breaking through the kitchen window to come inside, a thief in the night). It was her father. There is no part of this that is possible to describe adequately in words, though one must try in situations such as these, where it is equally impossible not to describe it at all. By proxy, you might imagine it as the mountains suddenly sprouting eyes and speaking to you, or, being lost in the vastness of space, to be able to see, in close, the scale and magnitude of the storm on Jupiter. He looked frail, as though he was turning to dust inside, with sunken cheeks and a thin white coat.
We all met him while he was in a state of dazed recognition, smiling politely, though with a look of deep confusion seemingly permanently affixed to his expression, just below the surface. There was hardly any time for all of this of course, keep in mind that the whole world is crumbling around us. We raced through the forest with an immense heat at our backs. Those that could not keep up were intentionally crawled over or kicked backwards, as though the flames were some wild beasts that could be slowed down and satiated through sacrifice. Across a small stream, the forest opened up to an empty field, and in it, a small alcove that almost fit all of the rats that were ambling on top of one another just to stay within its confines. The fire never quite reached this far though, and the rats felt quite safe in their new home, some of them even took to burrowing deeper in order to expand it.
By the morning, all was calm. Water trickled down from icicles and sparkled in the light of dawn as song birds hopped along the thawing earth, careful to avoid the scurrying rats, all in a mad rush to find food. Henrietta was looking out over the great expanse when another rat rested its head across her shoulders, “We would like some grass and branches to cover up this place, can you go find some?”
She would slip out to weave carefully through patches of long grass, keeping her eye frantically chasing the wind that swept through and kept the world around her in a constant state of change. There would be no other adventures for the day though, now creeping beasts chasing them all down burrowed tunnels. When she returned, it was as an electric current had been passed through the whole colony. Through all the chatter, a sudden burst of hysterical laughter could be heard here and there, but it would often quickly dissolve into violent and panicked outbursts, which also seemed to end as abruptly as they began. Elizabeth seemed to be still gazing off into the distance waiting for Henrietta’s return.
“He left you, you know.”
Someone called out indignantly to the rat who had said it, urging her to keep quiet, but instead it had the effect of quieting the whole audience, except for a few remaining squeals, misplaced remnants of the dying commotion. All were waiting for a spectacle. “To start a family.” The rat continued, now jeered on by the crowd. The old, thinning rat looked up and smiled politely at Henrietta from his slumped sitting position when he saw that she was looking at him. “Why else would he pretend like he did and then disappear indefinitely? Think about it reasonably.” The audience was in a loud commotion by this point, rolling over each other and laughing out in drunken fits from the disconnected stories they had been telling each other in the excited silence that had only just collapsed. This scene too could only hold for so long though before giving way to something new. The rats started scurrying in every direction, except for the one with the polite smile plastered on his face, who was soon nestled tightly in the talons of a great hawk, pulled in itself by the clamour of the crowd. When it had left, when the rats started trickling back into the small alcove, they all stared up at the sky in astonishment, as if the wrath of God had suddenly come down to wash the Earth clean. There was hushed gossip among friends, but as more people came, and more knew each other, connecting the groups, one by one, this quiet lull of voices soon grew into an uproarious and deafening chatter. A single voice that could not wait to see what the new day would bring.
