While walking to my car from my creative writing class today I got the sudden idea that I should write a short story from the perspective of one of my rats, Drat. Written 11/20/09. This will be added onto at some point in the near future.
Confessions of a Drat
My cellmate lives up to his name-constantly climbing the walls and attempting to wrestle me into submission for my meager portion of food. But my age and experience often bests his youthful exuberance. Periodically I throw him down to the floor and stare him in the eyes silently while he futilely attempts to push me away.
We rarely see the sunlight, as our captor turns off the lights and plunges us into darkness several times a day-if the time that passes could be considered a "day." I know not the difference between the days, weeks, and months. The only light emanates from a small room behind a cracked door-always out of reach, never able to see the outside-the seasons changing, the tree branches swaying and creaking in the wind. It is the small things in life that we cannot appreciate until they are stolen from us.
We were bought on a black market, stolen from our brothers and brought together in this hell. But I came first, over a year more familiar with these bars and bare walls than he. A lowly visage of a shadowy figure surrounded by meat flanks on hooks often hovers in my dreams, transposed from the framed picture on the wall. One could only venture a guess as to what kind of animal (or animals) came to such a fate, to be immortalized in a photograph and enlarged for all to see, a sort of menacing warning not to go astray.
Cows? Pigs? They were too large to be chickens, or even rats for that matter. Human, perhaps? These are the questions that often occupied my mind as Rudie would pace the floors back and forth as if by doing so he may be able to walk the length of the earth and liberate himself from this place.
We were not given beds, blankets, or even clothes. We had to huddle together, one man and a boy-child, naked on the hard, rough floor, hoping for warmth. Any place else and I would be named a pedophile, made to go from door to door informing the families housed within of my sex offender status. But in this atmosphere of sudden harsh, blinding light and a darkness just as startling, nothing was too strange. There were no norms here, only the reminder of a past life that I could almost touch through the cell bars.
His teenage rambunctiousness seemed to take over him like a demon waiting in the recesses of his soul for the perfect moment to emerge. He would act so bizarre that I would often wonder if an exorcism would do him any good. Perhaps then I could sleep at night.