Girls and Rats have Cooties

One morning in Chicago I saw a black rat on the sidewalk. It was clearly poisoned, clearly still alive. As fat as a squirrel and as long as my arm, eyes wide and wild, it tottered back and forth on locked-up limbs outside the auto body shop I passed every morning, whose mechanics routinely stood around, smoking and jeering at the terrified blonde girl, whose eyes were also wide and wild as she scrambled for the relative safety of the El train.

Neither of us, rat nor girl, new the other existed before today. Neither of us welcomed the news; the rat, because it had other things on its mind; and me, because I could never unknow it.

As I got older, I studied the rats, took their measurements. I spent years fashioning suits of armor out of facts and figures. “This will protect me from the rats,” I thought. I thought the rats were a threat.

But the rats are not the threat. That was my mistake. The threat is the poison. The threat lies in not seeing that the rat and I were allies, just trying to live, trying to make it past that auto body shop.

That rat is dead. It probably died within hours. But there are others. No one in this great history has ever learned how to completely exterminate rats.

And of course, I am still alive. And I have learned much since then.

The auto body mechanics would be wise to leave this one alone. She will not be pawed at like a toy; she will bite.

And there is an army of us, swarming underground, teeth and tails twitching. There is only so long we will continue to be satisfied eating garbage. Any moment now, we will burst to the surface, pouring out the manhole covers, nosing the sewer grates aside, a tidal wave of furious fur.

Woe then to the would-be predators and poisoners.

All hail the rats.