Rat

A young boy finds a rat and decides to play with it.

Written October 2016

It was a chilled autumn evening when the boy found the rat. A scruffy, fat, filthy varmint. And he was sitting directly next to the worn tire the boy liked to play with.  

Stricken with a thought, the boy ran back into the house and into his suffocating bedroom. He went to work rummaging through his closet and drawers. It was somewhere. It had to be somewhere. The boy searched under his bed and there it was! Right next to the deflated football.  

He pulled out the empty fish bowl and blew away some dust. He ran back out to take care of his rat problem. It was still there. Sitting on its hind legs, twitching its creepy, little nose.   

The boy set down the bowl and cautiously crept closer to the pest. With one sudden swoop, he nabbed the rat and held it by the tail. “Gotcha!” He declared triumphantly.   

The rat shrieked and began to curl itself around the boy’s hand in an effort to stay right-side up. Its tiny legs scrambling through the air all the while.  

With a soft thud, the boy dropped the rat into his old fish bowl. The rodent squeaked again before attempting to climb up the smooth walls of the bowl. The boy watched through the glass as the rat slide down the side, only to try in vain as the same thing happened again.  

His smile was thin as he lowered himself onto his stomach. He gazed through the cloudy glass at the balding, gray rat. Its left front paw twitched like a wrinkled-up worm.   

Without warning, the boy placed his hand over the top and wrapped his left arm around the circumference of the glass. He gave the bowl one swift jerk and listened to the thud of the rat as it hit the walls of the prison.   

“Wham! Wham! Wham!” The boy yelled with each shake. His ragged tire was long forgotten.  

The rat cried along to the rhythm of the thuds created by its own body, and the boy’s shrill laughter tied in with the gruesome melody. His smile was strong as he watched his entertainment slide around the bowl.  

A gruff voice forced his amusement to halt. “Ge’in here! C’mon now ge’in here!”  

The boy slowly sat upright. He scowled down at the rat and pointed a finger at it. “Don’t move! Be quiet and don’t move!”  

The balding man placed his open bottle on the end table, it’s legs barely able to support the weight. He shifted his gaze from the television to a point just above the boy’s head. “Where’s ma lighter?”  

The boy, with eyes glued to the stained carpet, pointed to the barely standing side table. A red lighter lie next to the half empty bottle and old lottery tickets.   

The man shook his head slowly, as if too much movement would knock it off his square shoulders. “Nah, not that one. Ma good one. Ya know? The black one with the white stripe.”  

There was no answer. The television glowed, flashing bright images of advertisements with spokespeople jabbering away as background noise.  

“I know ya took it. Ya always takin’ stuff that don’t belong to ya. Now I’m gonna ask you one more time ya filthy vermin. Where’s my lighter? Huh?”  

The boy managed to muster out an “I don’t know” before he dodged the man’s lunging arms. He bolted to the door in a failed attempt to flee before hands wrapped around him and plucked him from the ground.    

“Where is it? Huh? Where is it?” The man shook the boy six times before he managed to cry out another “I don’t know”.  

The boy tumbled to the ground like a fallen angel. The man erupted in a hacking fit and returned to the deep indent in the couch cushion. His attention turned back to the television, the lighter seemingly forgotten along with the boy’s presence.  

The boy scrambled out the door with as much quiet as he could muster. The bright sunshine mocked his glossy eyes as he mindlessly trudged down the gravel driveway. The light bounced off something shiny and hit the boy in the eye. He blinked away the blindness and searched for the source of the brightness.   

There, right where he left it, was the fish bowl and the captive rodent inside. The boy veered off to the bowl and lowered his head to study the rat sitting inside. Its nose twitched with the same frequency of its paw.  

The boy placed a finger against the glass. His fingertip measured the size of the rat’s head.  

With one swift movement, the boy grasped the top of the bowl with both hands. He gently tipped it over and stood up, watching as the rat scurried off into the sun.