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RATS By
Dennis DiClaudio I have stories like rats; malformed, maladroit, malnourished on slips of paper, backs of receipts, half finished in half-filled notebooks infesting my home so that I cannot walk into the kitchen without being reminded of some progeny which I had nursed partially into creation and then left to rot beside the toaster. They scutter across the floor and meet my gaze when I least wish to be reminded of their existence. I am oppressed. I have trouble coping. Several
evenings ago, I returned home in good spirits after drinking with friends,
and, upon turning on the light, found no less than a dozen of them in
congress on my living room floor. They and I froze for a long instant, and
then suddenly there was a flurry of activity and they had retreated back into
the corners and shadows. I was left with a breathless feeling and my hand
clutched to my chest. My constitution will not hold up much longer under
these conditions. I know that I should capture them one by one and send them
into the fire to rest in finality. If I cannot finish them in one way, I
should finish them in another. Perhaps it is best that they be destroyed and
forgotten. It is not kind to leave a story hobbled and unloved, especially
when I had once showed it so much loving kindness, tinkering with its
paragraphs and punctuation like gentle caresses, until, one night, it finds
itself untimely ripped from its typewriter nest. Abandoned and shunned, life must
be cold. But
it is for exactly that reason that I cannot bring myself to do them in. I did
once love them. Each one of them had its turn as my nursling, and I had cared
for each above all others. However, due to some quasi-maternal deficiency, I
cannot love them still. My heart does not have space for more than but one,
the newest, the youngest, the one I had yet to send, premature, between two
stacks of folders, the one that is still pretty and full of hope. And yet I
cannot kill them. To be honest, they frighten me. I don’t want to touch them.
It is in some part their smell. They stink of defalcation, and after even
being revisited by one, I am compelled to wash my hands thoroughly. It is
also that they are hideous to view; lame, meagerly-formed, still covered in
the scars of their copy editing marks and margin notes. They’re a wreck of
ideas that could not be fit together properly, and they stumble more than
scurry from the bookshelf to beneath the chair with a terrible arrhythmic
patter. The sound disturbs me utterly. What
was it about them that had caused me to abandon them in turn? That, I don’t
know. With whom does the fault lie? I suppose that it lies with me. There are
so many of them, and I continue birthing them without care for consequence. I
know what I am doing when I sit down at my desk and begin the manipulation of
yet another embryo. Can they be blamed for their own inadequacies when I was
the one who had failed to shape them properly? I can assume what the outcome
will be, and yet I continue. It is always with the hope that this one will be
different, and it so rarely is. There were so few that had been born full,
and they had all gone off and left me to the rejects. It is only those I do
not love that keep me company. * *
* Yesterday night, I sat resting in my chair
halfway to sleep, when I was startled by something shifting in the corner of
my eye, and, upon looking, found one of them there glaring at me from the end
table. My initial reaction was to jump back with my hands in the air and let
go a shriek, but something, perhaps its proximity, kept me from it. Instead,
calmly, I sat there and watched it huddled, breathing uneasily, and, for a
long moment, we were still. I recognized it as one of my earliest
miscarriages, nearly complete and tossed away for some reason I cannot
remember now. I don’t know quite how long it had lived in the shadows and
corners of my house, but there it sat, encrusted in dust and lint and filth.
It smelled very bad. It
talked. In a uncouth vocalization that was more wheezing susurration than
voice, it asked why it had been abandoned. Why had I brought it part-way
about and then abandoned it? I was quiet, frightened. I spoke earlier of my
cowardice when dealing with my offspring, but now, if they were to begin
climbing onto furniture to interrogate me, I thought that I might have to
pack up and move. It repeated its question. I answered that I did not have an
answer. I could not remember why I had abandoned it, that perhaps I had found
it lacking in some matter. Perhaps, I said, I had thought it better that it
should lay stillborn in my home then monument to my own inferiority in some
dusty journal someplace. Why then, it asked through spastic vocal
convulsions, had I not been kind enough to destroy it at once? Again, I had
no answer. The
little derelict creature was a pitiful sight, matched only in its pathos by
my own terrible guilt. I wanted to do something for it, to help it, so long
as I would not have to touch it in any way. Possibly, it had seen me inching
from my chair toward a sheet I hoped
to throw over it, because it spoke back up. If I could not remember why I had
passed on it, it said, then perhaps it could still be saved. It commanded me
to lift it, and I, after some thoughtful deliberation, cravenly lowered my
palm down to the end table, and nearly swooned as the thing shifted its
weight onto my hand. Take me to the desk, it said. I asked why I should do
that, but it merely repeated its command. I did so. I carried it into the
study, and, doing so, sought almost to counter its weight in my hand by
lowering arm until, when we reached the desk, it was at knee-level. I placed
it on the desk, as it had told me to do, beside the typewriter. Still in the
cradle of the machine, was my newest child, a story I had only begun writing
a few nights earlier. Its vital organs were not nearly formed, but it was
coming along nicely. I had great hopes for that one. I
want you, the hideous one informed me, to pull that story out of the
typewriter and throw it into the fire. Into the fire? I told it that I would
not. I said that it was innocent and helpless. It needed me to help it on. It
would be infanticide. You will, in time, the miscarriage said, forsake it, as
you have forsaken all of the rest of us. It is only right that it should die
now, while it still knows only the warm embrace of love. I
didn’t want to do it. God knows I didn’t, but again cowardice proved a
stronger instinct then nurturing. I pulled my newest scion out, carried it,
still cooing, to the flame, and dropped it in. There was a short bit of
anguished noise as the hot tongues licked at its edges and then finally burnt
it to a thin slip of ash. I was watery in the eyes and would not watch. And
then all was quiet again. Now, the thing said to me, you will continue with
me where you have left off. * *
* Emitting a low satisfied moan, it stretched back
in apparent ecstasy as I weaved the newly forming sinews of its tendons and muscles,
pulling together appendages which had previously been left lame. I connected
its organs to its bodily systems, allowing it to breath easier, its blood to
flow more regularly, warming areas that had been forever cold and numb. At
times it would wince, feeling the pins and needles of its nerve ending
suddenly coming painfully to life. I must admit that I could not tell why I
had let it go initially. It seemed to be a quite promising story, only
requiring minor alterations and segues between its various scenes and
expositions. It was, somewhat late, coming along nicely. When
I stopped typing and rose from the desk, the story woke from its rapturous
catatonia and screamed for me to sit and return to work. I replied that I
needed to stretch my legs, have a drink and maybe a cigarette. I’d been
working for hours and the joints of my fingers were tightening. I needed a
break, I said. It thought this over, and then agreed to grant me a short
rest, but stated quite firmly that it would be finished that night. I was not
to be trusted. I informed it that I couldn’t work through the night, that my
eyes were already getting bleary. I would need sleep eventually. No, it said.
Tonight. Hanging
my head in my hands on the front porch, surrounded in the late evening sound
of buzzing and chirping, my mood turned from a vague satisfaction to an acute
shame. Here was this thing which I had sired ordering me about as though I
were its servant. I am not a strong man, but I do have a sense of the natural
order of things, and stories simply do not dictate their will over their
authors. At least they should not. I looked out over the horizon, and the sky
there was changing to a deep indigo. I could not go without sleep. When
I returned to the study, the thing was enjoying its new mobility. It strutted
back and forth across the floor, unaware of my returning. It was nice to see
it working so well, and I was almost happy for it, until I happened to glance
back at the door and notice a cluster of the other incomplete stories jealously
eyeing this one. Upon seeing me see them, they fled. How long would it be
before the others gained the courage to follow this one’s example, to keep me
from rest, to mutinize against me. They would become emboldened eventually
unless something was done. I would have to take action now. The
creaking of my chair as I climbed back behind the desk disturbed the story’s
pacing. It snapped back to attention and hopped onto the desk and into the
typewriter’s cradle. Are you happy with my revisions so far, I asked. It said
it was, but that it thought its middle segment needed more exposition. I
happily agreed to look that section over again. I said that I had myself come
up with some excellent new ideas in my time away. It seemed to like that. I
went back to typing. I am coming along brilliantly, it informed me. I will be
an excellent story, it said, fit for publication in the finest journals and
magazines. I agreed. I typed faster. It groaned. I lit a cigarette and
inhaled deeply. Past the haze of my exhalations, the other little
abominations were back at the door, watching. More dialogue, it directed me,
more dialogue. Taking that as my cue, I labored to craft possibly the finest
sentence that ever I had written. It was a strong sentence, sturdy in its
brevity, but not with the faint frills of poetics, and the thing flailed back
in climax. Immediately, I ripped it from the typewriter, still reeling,
powerless to resist or even speak. It could only gape at me from my fist,
bewildered and confused, and watch as I carried it to the fire. Only once I
reached the hearth did it regain its senses and struggle to get loose, but I
held it firmly. Do not do this, it bellowed. I said nothing. I simply
released it into the flame. The howl echoed throughout the house. My face
still amber from the burning glow, I turned a cocked smile toward the others,
who had, horrorstricken, observed the murder, and now scurried quickly away.
They ran to the refuge of the shadows. A moment later, the thing was ash and
I walked upstairs to prepare myself for bed. * *
* So, that was all for that one, but there were many others. I knew now what needed to be done. Tonight, I will find them all and finally do what I should have done long ago. Tomorrow, I will start again fresh. ** Dennis DiClaudio
edits for (parenthetical
note) and Ducky Magazine. He lives in Philadelphia
and lost his roommate's copy of Gravity's Rainbow on the subway; it remains unread. 
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