The Rat
By Gene Aronowitz
While preparing for bed, we heard squeaking and hissing sounds, signifying distress. “At last,” my wife said, “we finally got it.” I smiled since that rat had been wandering around our cellar with impunity for an entire week, somehow avoiding our trap.
The next morning, smelling success as well as the rancid scent of death, we slowly went down to the cellar but stopped on the last step. The rat lay on her side, her pink-clawed feet embedded deep in the huge, pitch-black glue trap. But, like a surreal collage, one of her feet stood separated from the leg to which it had once been attached. I instinctively turned away.
Her white belly, just a shade darker than my own hair, faced us. The rest of her coat was mostly brown but tan in spots. some of it still fluffy, the remainder stiff, attached to the adhesive. Her long tail, now forever curved into an “S,” was less furry, its brown color the same as her long tapering, almost hairless ears, only one of which was visible. Her captive snout, with its pink nose and sensory whiskers, exposed scary, tusk-like incisors inside her permanently open mouth. Her glue-trapped bulging eye must have seen the cellar slowly darken as both night and death approached, the other eye closed in repose.
Near her were three babies, just old enough to walk, captured, I suspect, on their way to be nursed. Two of them were like Siamese twins, their short, grey hair intertwined in an embrace. The head of the fourth was also trapped, the remaining body parts stretched out on the cold, clammy, concrete floor close to the steps on which we stood and stared.
I stepped over the carcass and got a shovel. My wife put the remains in a box, which she carried outside. We made our way, slowly, to the side of our willow tree, where I prepared a grave and carefully covered the cardboard coffin with soil.
