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God’s own rats

Author’s note: I decided to participate in this weeks flash fiction challenge from Chuck Wendig. The challenge was to write based on a randomly generated title and I drew “God’s own” + “Rats”. Enjoy!

 

The rats come at midnight. Why always at midnight? I wonder.

They come in the darkness, their claws skittering across wooden floorboards and the sound of their terrible squeaking chattering from the walls of my bedroom where I lie in bed and try very hard to sleep.

The sounds of the rats echo in the darkness and I can feel their presence in the room with me. I can feel the rats almost as if their wriggling bodies and wiry fur were pressed right up against me.

My skin crawls.

I feel for the first time in decades like a small child once again — afraid of the monster under the bed. Except the rats are real and my fear of their sharp claws and sharper teeth is not so unfounded. They’ve bitten me before. Ferocious little wounds that first festered and oozed and then scarred.

I’ve learned my lesson now — I’ve learned to cower in my bed, safe on my floating island, safe atop these tall wooden posts that no rat has yet managed to climb.

—

I tried everything possible to control the rat problem.

The war began gently with the sound of scurrying in the walls some nights, when I lay awake in bed and tried very hard not to listen.

I bought ultrasonic deterrents and catch and release traps. But still the rats rummaged in the walls, undeterred, and I caught not a single rat in my traps.

I tried all manner of bait: cheese, peanut butter, bacon.

I tried everything.

I switched the humane traps for snap traps and then for the sticky glue kind.

Still, I caught not a single rat.

Finally, in desperation following the night on which a rat had skittered across tops of my bare feet and then bit me —  finally, I found I was reduced to poison.

I poisoned my house nearly myself and for the first time thanked God for my lack of children.

And still the rats came at midnight — always they came at midnight.

I hired exterminators and when they too had failed to put an end to the vermin, I quit. I quit my house and packed up my things and walked out the front door.

I refused to look back.

I refused to look back at the home that had been mine for the better part of 10 years, the home in which I had first been alone and then married and then alone again when she passed so unexpectedly.

I quit the house and refused to look back because those were the memories I didn’t like to think about.

—

I moved to a small apartment on the other side of town. A nice, new building with a sleek, modern look.

I moved to an apartment whose aspect seemed itself to be a powerful rat deterrent. Surely nothing so uncouth as a rat would be found in a place like this.

I tried not think about how it was my wife’s life insurance money that was paying for the expensive new apartment. I shrugged the thoughts off brusquely: she was gone, life was sometimes unexpectedly short, and — in light of that — why not enjoy the finer things now?

And besides, any price was worth being rid of those damned rats.

—

The new apartment was a definite improvement — smaller and quieter and most importantly rat-free. The space felt better too, less cavernous and echoing.

I didn’t rattle in the new apartment the way I had in the old house — as though I was dancing about to the lingering tune of my dead wife’s ghost. Tiptoeing from room to room, sashaying about the obstruction of her chair, dodging trinkets and knick-knacks left to linger on shelves.

I left all that behind. The constant reminders of her aching absence — I left behind everything except a few mementos.

Our wedding picture. Her favorite necklace. The photo album I hadn’t dared to crack open.

I found the pieces of her — lying in tatters about the wreck of what had been our life together — and I assembled them, packed them up, brought them with me, and set them up anew.

No longer shattered and shambled but ordered — an incomprehensible tragedy made tidy.

A tortured memory made whole.

—

The rats didn’t come back after that. I never again heard them in the walls of my home.

The money from the life insurance ran out and I was forced to relocate once again to a more modest apartment in a different part of town.

Still, the rats didn’t come back.

And then one night, just when I thought I might never spy another rat again, a particularly large and lumbering one skitters out into the city street and clambers right across my shoes.

I froze — my skin crawling with revulsion, a kind of visceral shudder I found myself unable to repress.

The rat froze too and so we stood — the rat mere inches from my boot.

We stared — paralyzed in a shared moment.

A car starts farther down the block and the moment breaks — the sound sends the rat chattering down the storm drain and into the sewer.

Thrice-damned rats, I grumble to myself. But then I feel just the tiniest flutter of a chuckle on my lips, knowing how far I’ve come, how distant those tormented memories now lie.

God’s own thrice-damned rats.

When I look back, I see

When I look back the images that I see are of me, a little girl cast adrift in a sea that is vaster than her own imagination. I see myself in math class, attempting to hold within the circle of my skull the number of drops of water in the ocean.

I see infinity and zero superimposed such that infinity is nothing more than two zeros. I see infinity in the Ouroboros – and I struggle to reach my own tail – to become at once infinite and still nothing more than two zeros.infinity symbol

Two zeros side-by-side, like breasts, the pendulous sort I never grew. The sort of breasts I dreamed of as a little girl when I lay in bed at night and felt the tenderness of blossoms on my chest.

Two zeros side-by-side like me, a small zero tucked away in the larger cavern of my mother’s womb, sharing life-blood and oxygen back and forth between our two connected destinies. A moment in the infinite re-production of life stretching back through untold generations of mother giving birth to mother and to mother.

When I look back I see the moments in which I dared not stretch to my full height for fear of being too tall and I see the moments in which I sang oh-so-quietly for fear of being off-key.

I see the moments of lack and they are, each and every one, met by an equal moment of grace: the afternoon I spent at the beach not-thinking, just waiting for my heartbeat to synchronize with the rhythm of the tide.

I see sun drenched days spent on beaches with friends, with family. I see rocks that begged to be climbed until I could stand atop them like a god and know that I was just as infinite as our ever-expanding universe.

When I look back, I see everything.

http://youtu.be/ubqDHAUaMVM

I’d love to hear from you! What do you see when you look back? Let me know in the comments.

The drumbeat in my temples

The first time it happens I think I might be dying.

I’m in third grade. I’m sitting in the classroom and there’s a spot in my vision, a speck that shimmers in the morning light.

At first the speck is small and unimportant and I think that if I ignore it, it will simply go away.

And then it grows.

The spot grows and grows, eating everything in its path. First, a pencil eraser. Then it gobbles up my name, traced in graphite at the top of my worksheet.

It curves, a shimmering blue crescent, a lake of opacity that dominates my sight.

It mesmerises.

—

I’ve never experienced anything like it. No one has ever told me that you can have a shimmering pool of not-quite-moonlight-on-water in your eye that grows and grows, blotting out everything in its path.

I do not interrupt my teacher, not then, not at first. Not so much because I am not frightened, but because I am not certain of what words might be used to describe my problem. I am not sure how to speak of this pounded-silver crescent that has developed in my eye.

I say nothing about this spot and it’s growing-ness. I watch it as it grows until, just at the moment when I am about to panic, it begins, once more, to recede.

Evaporating from its edges like tidal waters dragged out, once more, to sea.

My vision returns.

And then the agony sets in.

—

I go home from school that day and my mother teaches me the word for migraine. She calls my shimmering crescent a “visual aura” and tells me that they come and then go and are followed by a headache.

She gives me Advil and a cup of tea because the caffeine will make the Advil more effective.

It is the day I learn that Advil doesn’t help a migraine. Not even if you take it with caffeine.

—

There will be other migraines after that first one. Several handfuls before I mostly grow out of them somewhere between middle school and high school.

Many will be treated with some Advil and an ineffectual cup of tea.

Some will be so bad that I vomit from the pain.

And it will be many years before I can face the aroma of a simple cup of tea without the echo of a drumbeat in my temples.

I’d love to hear from you! Let me know what you thought of this piece in the comments below 🙂

This is what I’m thankful for

Happy almost-Thanksgiving! It’s a time when the internet is flooded with musings about two things: turkey and gratitude. And since this isn’t going to be a post about turkey, I thought I’d better make it about gratitude — enjoy!

This is what I’m thankful for

Ten toes tighten in cold sand and I feel the grit scrape against my skin as I’m chilled. A gloomy November sky glowers overhead and the cold Pacific ocean swirls about my toes and sweeps me out to sea and I’m freezing but my heart soars because it knows that this means I’ve come home.

Fingers hover over smooth plastic keys and the cursor blinks at me in a way that should be disconcerting — my wordlessness made comical as the cursor counts the seconds ticking by, each a moment wasted without the writing of a single word. But instead of anger there is stillness because the words are stirring and somewhere deep inside me I know they’re waiting — waiting for the moment I find quiet enough to finally hear their whispers.

The house is cold and I’ve not felt my toes in hours but the water is piping hot and the steam curls up from the mug, dampens as it condenses on cold fingers cupped over the warmth of rising water vapor. I hold the cup in the palms of my hands, raise it to my lips, and sip. I taste the essence of a smile.

Two arms wrap around me strong and warm and I burrow myself into the press of body-upon-body and bask in the rhythm of a heartbeat I know almost like it was my very own. I close my eyes and tighten my grip on the family I hold so very dear.

The first flakes fall and I know it’s winter because the ground goes white and frosted and perfect. The sky opens up and buries old hurts under a fresh new blanket — scrubbed clean and whitewashed, we are made-up and re-created in this moment. The season of imagination looms near, when snow and darkness wrap each house in muffled quiet and dreams of sugarplums come dancing near.

The dawn breaks and night’s grip weakens as the sky is brushed back from black to ever-lightening grey. When I woke the stars still shone, marching ever westward in their dance across the sky. Each light winking out now, as the sun rises to greet the turning of the Earth. A new day dawns and I yet live to see it.

The fragile strength of lungs expands my ribcage, bends soft bones outward until I am larger than the me I was half a breath ago. The poetry of a breath lies in the stillness that awaits — pounding like a heartbeat into the silent passage of air, whispering through the body.

Now, I’d love to hear from you. Let me know what you’re thankful for in the comments below!

Wanted: Two legs, possibly stocky.

I’ve got something a bit different to share this week: Chuck Wendig has issued a flash fiction challenge using these hilarious and bizarre stock photos as prompts.

Since I’m a naturally indecisive person, I used a random number generator and drew this image:

Getty Images/iStockphoto dreamerve via buzzfeed.com

And here is my resulting fiction.

Wanted: Two legs, possibly stocky

The problem was that it is nearly impossible to find a pair of legs divorced from their associated brains. For one thing, such legs are naturally found only rarely — most legs being rather firmly affixed to their proper brains by way of a torso and spine. And, even in such rare cases of leg-brain separation, it is particularly difficult to track the brainless pair.

After all, without brains, the legs are forced to wander — mindlessly.

And frankly, she was fed up with the search. Her missing legs were worse than a two-year-old.

She resented her legs for wandering off so spitefully after a particularly disdainful comment she’d made about the proportions of their thighs and the build of their calves.

She resented the bruising of her elbows from where she had been forced to drag herself about — reduced to something less than a crawl in the absence of her recalcitrant legs.

And most of all, she resented the absence of her seat.

She longed once more to stand tall — to look others in the eye as equals. She longed never again to hear someone jokingly refer to her as a shoegazer.

She longed, once again, to roam free.

Free once more to wander, free to run and chase, free to feel the tug of the wind in her mousey brown hair.

And for this she was willing at last to pay the price of two legs, imperfectly muscled and stocky.

–

A week went by, a month, and then two. She enlisted the help of friends and social media. She made phone calls to the local police department and placed wanted ads. She even called around to local department stores to see if anyone had found an extra pair of legs, perhaps discovered standing in the window display.

It was all to no avail.

The police informed her that as legs were not a whole person, no missing persons report could be filed for an absent set of bipedal appendages. The department stores assured her that all legs were present and accounted for and that no extra pairs were to be found.

Her friends set out and scoured the city — but always returned empty-handed.

And her pleas on social media had made her temporarily Twitter-famous — but still it was for naught.

Her legs were utterly vanished.

–

It was a Tuesday.

It was a Tuesday in November and her friends had demanded she quit moping about the house and get on with her life. They had insisted she join them after work for a drink.

And so she had dragged her self on weary elbows down the block to the local bar and she had looked about grudgingly for her friends’ familiar sneakers.

She didn’t see them. She couldn’t see them through the forest of feet that filled the bar and she knew instinctively that this had been a mistake.

Any moment now she would be tripped upon or stumbled over and then she would be trampled like so much dirt beneath an unfriendly shoe.

Sighing in resignation she made her way reluctantly toward the bar, unsure how she might ever hope to mount a stool and be seen by the bartender – perhaps she would just hide in the shadows beneath its dark paneled surface, safe from the general hubbub and ever so many feet.

She reached the bar at last and found her self eye-to-foot with a pair of handsome ankle boots, brown leather and with a three-inch heel. How she longed to wear such shoes once more and she found her thoughts wandering to her own favorite pair, now reduced to languishing forlornly in the back of her closet.

Her gaze traveled further upward… past shapely calves and well-toned thighs and lingered with envy upon the elegant swell of derriere…

And it was then she realized that these legs were missing their torso and brain–

“Legs!” she exclaimed, “I’ve found you! You’re mine!”