She is in love with a rat. It is Kafkaesque, this squirming non-human fauna floundering her thoughts and enveloping her desires. She met this rat on the floor of her bedroom, as she searched the floor for a missing earring.
Fearing that Rat would eat her alive, she gazed into those eyes, as you do with a newfound love, and told Rat that she was not a threat. She would look after it, make it smile to reveal thin, yellowing teeth like two skis traveling fast down a mountain.
She has never asked it if it’s been to a mountain, but she can certainly stipulate.
“Rat,” she said.
Rat lifted its tiny arms and pushed its hands into its beedy little peepers as if staring into the sun.
She left small bits of turkey, unsalted cashews, and a soft stalk of celery on a paper plate, hoping to entice it the next day. It never came.
“Why didn’t you eat that first meal I left for you?” she asked Rat one night, as she stroked his head and he burped up a two-day-old mealworm.
“Because I don’t eat at two o’clock. Do you?”
She eventually got ahold of him by staying awake most of the evening, listening for Rat’s feet to hit the floor and scuttle to her side. She could feel the tiny breaths on her forehead like rain dropping from a roof. She slowly opened her eyes to see Rat looking past her, at a spider crawling along the windowsill. In the still of darkness, Rat pounced over her, engulfing itself upon the poor thing, ripping the limbs and licking its fingers.
The next day she went to work, eyeballing the office balcony and printing budget sheets in colour. Everyone told her not to, but it required more effort than black and white.
“You seeing anyone?” Livvy, the assistant manager, giggled to her.
“No,” she replied. “But I like someone.”
“Oh yeah? What’s he look like?”
“They’re a rat.”
Livvy nodded conclusively and said, “All men are.”
“Please, don’t leave.” She puts her hand over Rat’s the next night, her fingers digging into its soft forearms. Rat is almost lifesize, about the same size as a chair. Rat is bewildered by her request, its tail surveying the surface of her bedsheets.
“I can’t stay here,” Rat finally answers.
“I know you can’t. It’s just…I quite like the feeling of having you around. Please.”
As soon as she stops talking, she feels cheap. No one has ever revealed their feelings so quickly to a rat and everything suddenly feels squished together, the room depleted of air.
Rat’s eyes widen, which, for a rat, grow to an oddly large size, and he says to her, “I don’t have much to offer you.”
“I don’t care, Rat.”
“Tiff, listen.”
She has never heard a rat say her name, even when she wanted them to. She would love to wring Rat’s tiny neck and say “SAY IT AGAIN. SAY IT AGAIN. SAY IT LOUD. SAY IT PROUD.” but instead, she nods and settles back into her pillow.
“There are men who can offer you so much more, Tiff. Truly.”
Rat’s tail, as if mirroring a different body part, begins to grow stiff as Tiff stretches her body beneath the sheets, soft moaning with breaths that feel like feet walking on wet sand.
“You can’t be satisfied with a rat, Tiff.” Rat is talking as if to stop them from moving.
“Please, stop talking,” she says, her breath finally still. She is at peace, some sort of peace, with the idea that Rat will never want her. In her limited human eyes, it is enough to see what beauty really looks like. And some might say it is like the human body splayed across a couch, every fold of skin resting evenly amongst the next, enveloped only enough to show its connectedness. But you only know beauty when you want to reach out and hold it, as if having it close to you brings it within you.
“I think you are beauty, Rat. I think you’re beautiful.”
But they’ve left already.
The next day at work, Livvy brings her a cup of lukewarm tea that she’s neglected to drink. Tiff has only ever seen her drink water with chopped lemon, which she swallows without chewing. Tiff is surprised she doesn’t have a boyfriend.
“How is it going with your guy?” Livvy asks.
“My rat?”
Livvy laughs in small squeaks, like someone getting in and out of a desk chair.
“Yes, your ‘rat’.”
“Rat is okay.”
“He’s a rat named ‘Rat’? Isn’t that a bit impersonal?”
Tiff pauses. “It’s…not really about that. Anyway, I don’t think I’ll see him for a few days.”
“Why? Did you get in a fight?”
“I think I scared him away.”
“I didn’t think rats were scared of much.”
Tiff thinks she is mocking the situation, which, if he were a man, there would be no need for a trivial tone. But because he is a rodent, everything falls to what could be the problem, it’s just a rat, you’ll meet another one, blah blah blah.
“He’s scared of getting involved with me I think.”
“That’s normal. If he’s a man, he’ll get over it. If he’s not, he’ll retreat with his tail between his legs. Literally.”
Rat doesn’t show for a few days and Tiff is finally ready to accept the possibility of meeting another one. She starts to fantasize that maybe he will look like Patrick Swayze, exemplified by a tiny mullet shaved into his overgrown scalp. Maybe he will be white with eyes like lasers, coming to slice her with a red hot iron. Maybe she’ll never meet another rat again and she’ll start to fill her wants with hunchback cockroaches or sexy daddy longlegs.
She decides then that she will not let Rat get away with this. If he has any sort of feelings towards her, he will come out and say them. Or she will plug up the hole in the wall and force him out.
She kneels below her bed and wiggles her way under the frame to the fist-sized hole and whispers, as seductively as she can, “Rat?”
At first, there is nothing except the alarm clock on her nightstand beeping in a neurotic four-count. And then,
“Tiff?”
“Please, come out and speak to me. Or let me speak to you.”
She presses an ear to the wall but there is nothing. Suddenly, a single gleaming eye, black against the already-blackness, stares back at her through the hole.
“What is it, Tiff?”
“I want you to explain why you’ve ignored me these last couple of days. Do I turn you off? Do I annoy you?”
“No. Of course not. But I have been here before, Tiff. And it doesn’t end well.”
Tiff is hardened by the notion that this rat has been in this position before; wanting an ass-less office worker with yellowing teeth and pudgy fingers. If these are qualities of other women he’s fallen for, then perhaps she is the least special person on the planet.
“It’s not to say that I don’t like you, Tiff. I’m incredibly attracted to you. But, I know I will forget you in a few months when I find someone new.”
A pause.
“Why are you crying, Tiff?”
“I’m not! And rats have good memories. I read that in National Geographic. And I know you wouldn’t forget me!”
Rat sighs. “Yes, we are born with a good memory. But just like you guys, some of us have harder brains to penetrate. It takes a lot more for some people. Or some rats. And I’m one of those rats.”
Tiff has been called a lot of things in bed, but she’s never been called forgettable under her own bed.
“And another thing too, Tiff. If I were to get to know you, I’d just want to eat you. You know that’s true.”
“That isn’t true and YOU know it! You’d never eat me.”
“If I were pressured into it, and you had been dead for a little while, I would. It’s like all cases of humans with animals. There is a certain amount of love, but it only goes so far. It has a ceiling, like everything else. And if we were to make it that far, all I’d wanna do is bite your fingers off and slash you till you bleed out.”
Tiff suppresses a moan. She splays her hand up on the wall, digging her nails into the drywall.
“Tiff?”
“Yes?”
“Why are you attracted to me?”
“I don’t know. I just am. You don’t really look like anyone I’ve ever liked before.”
“You’re attracted to me because of what I don’t look like?”
“Does it sound bad?”
“No, it’s just not what I expected.”
Tiff waits to see if he has anything else good to say, but all she can see is that eye, unmoving and unbudging. It’s as good a time as any, to be honest.
“Rat, I can’t help that I have feelings for you. It’s like, even though I don’t see you often, to know that you’re moving in between the walls and under my feet…it fills me with so much comfort. And true love is falling in love with everyone, even the people that some deem unworthy of it. And even though you say you’ll forget about me, I’m willing to live with that. You can make excuses but I’ll know they’re all excuses and I won’t believe a word you say. I know you want me and I’m telling you that you can have me. I’d like to think that when I die, which might be soon, you won’t eat me. If your friends or family members tried to take a bite out of me, you’d shoo them away and lay with my corpse, whispering how beautiful I am, even in death. That’s what I’d like to think, Rat.”
Tiff shuffles gently away from the hole, back towards her bed. She lies atop her sheets, feeling the comedown from saying what filled up her mind. There is euphoria in saying the truth. No matter how it is received.
Suddenly, a paw moves gently across her stomach. She opens her eyes to see Rat above her, leading with his mouth as he kisses her. She wraps her arms around his neck and sinks deeper into the bed. He is on top of her, kissing her neck, her arms, and her knuckles.
Sometimes it’s nice just to be alive.
They continue like this for some time, until he sits up, his paws resting on the bed and his fur ruffled on his back. He breathes heavily, watching her watch him.
“Is everything okay?” she asks.
“Yes, of course. Why do you ask?”
“Because you stopped.”
He runs a paw through the thin fur on his white belly.
“I just wanted a minute.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Come here,” he whispers, grabbing her arm and gliding her on top of him. Rat’s arms are wafer-thin and could be broken by the smallest touch, so Tiff is gentle when she takes his paws into her hands. And for a second, they don’t feel so different. One is softer, but they are both sharp, with little fingernails. Hers are colored blue, his bone-white.
Rat makes love with a steady rhythm; as he said, he’s been here before. And she can feel it. Every so often, he stops, asks if she is happy with this position, then continues.
Tiff wants to hear him moan, but she knows, like most men, he will remain silent. To make noise would be to compromise his control. Or something like that.
“Turn around,” he tells her.
She’s on her stomach when he says this, so she turns over to find that a huntsman spider is perched atop the window, all eight eyes staring giddily at this strange porn he has scuttled into.
“Let’s go against the wall in front of him,” Rat breathes deeper.
“Okay.”
They change positions, his paws pushing her hands further into the wall, his tail flopping in ecstasy. The spider puts one crab-like leg to its eyes and tries to turn itself around.
“Rat…..
rat….
RAT!!!”
Tiff feels like she is on a different planet, one of the really hot ones where the clouds swirl and you can never see the surface. Great craters where any kind of life could’ve breathed sit undeterred, where a lonely NASA probe juts along the rocky terrain beeping miserably to itself:
“Collect data.”
“Find life.”
“Take pictures.”
Rat hasn’t taken his eyes off the huntsman, who has moved to a corner of the room, except now his eyes are uncovered and his fangs have molded into a small smile. He likes what he sees. Rat doesn’t blame him.
“Watch us.”
The huntsman is still.
“Open your EYES.”
If Tiff had any self-respect, she’d tell him it’s kind of a mood killer to be this aggro over a spider and whether or not he’s watching them fuck up against a wall, but she’s still on that planet, waving at the international space station and the random astronaut on the toilet, staring out the window.
“Watch! WATCH, you stupid fucking spider,” Rat says, his breath deflating.
He comes in a raucous holler.
Tiff hasn’t seen him for a week.
He doesn’t bother seeing how she’s feeling (could she be pregnant?) or even scuttle along the wall to sit beside her bed whilst she cries in her sleep.
One night, as she tucks herself into bed, she listens at the walls for the scampering of paws on floors, moving through homes with their eyes on the prize. But she hears nothing.
She recalls the early days of knowing Rat, how all their conversations felt fresh like an untouched block of cheese spread thin on a cracker. She looks out the window and sees people clinging to one another, smoking outside of buildings and waiting on street corners. All of them, she thinks, are walking around trying to get over someone or something. And like many heartbroken office workers before her, she will wake up tomorrow and begin the day again.
But once you’ve fallen for a rat, the only way to think is minute by minute, slinking from one hole in the Earth to another.
A sound wakes her in the night like teeth clattering against stale bread.
From the corroded drainpipes of her apartment building, up to the moldy insulation that cushions her abode, to the chipped wallpaper that she covers with photos from magazines.
And like the name of God, the name of a mother, the name of your own, she says,
“Rat?”
There he must be.
“Tiff?”
“Yes!”
“If you died, I don’t think I would be able to eat you.”
She heaves a big sigh, feeling full.
This is life, she has lived it and she is full.
What’s left?
