collaborative storytelling that is equal parts critical and creative

The Rat with Mirror Eyes

Content Warning: Suicide

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I

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When the girl saw the rat crawling the yard’s fenceline perimeter, she went back into the house and opened the closet to grab a shoe box to trap it. But when she saw the rat’s mirror eyes, she pulled the box back. When the girl told her father about the rat with mirror eyes, he did not believe her. That night, when the father went out to the yard, he saw the eyes reflecting ambient suburban light into dual streams piercing across the quiet dark. He then walked back into the house and into his study, where he glanced at his reflection in the mirror before opening the locked drawer that held the family defense weapon. He turned the barrel against his head, releasing drops of glossy red reflection across the floor and walls.  

II

When the weekend came the funeral was attended by many humans and one rat with mirror eyes.  As the casket was lowered, the rat jumped from her perch on the Elm branch, where she had been watching as the rain poured down and the kind words were spoken, landing on the cherrytone case. She stared at the gatherers, and the gatherers stared back. Most understood, and because they understood, they cried deeper. Though the people were crying, the rat with mirror eyes did not have tear ducts, and some did not cry, they just remained silent.  The police escort, who was not accustomed to understanding, fired his gun hitting the rat’s eye with a bullet, but the eye was a mirror, and the bullet reflected back.

III

When the rat with the mirror eyes exited the cemetery gates she walked along a fence where a cat pounced.  The cat dangled the rat on his claws but when he saw the mirror eyes he knew he could not bite. The cat then lowered his back so the rat could jump on, and once the rat was secure, the cat ran quickly to the abandoned dry cleaner where he lived with his friends and lovers. As they arrived, the cat made the meow that he would make when he’d brought back food, but this time he had not brought food.  The cat showed his companions the rat with the mirror eyes, and from then on the cats did not eat rats or squirrels or birds and though they ate grass, the grass did not take. They remained hungry; hungry but understanding, and they did not live much longer.

IV

When the rat with mirror eyes was just a rat, she lived in a white room with a mirror that only reflected on one side.  Behind the mirror were voices. The injections made her skin burn and her organs grew large while her body stayed small, and her spine ached and she learned to resent the image of herself; herself but with the voices of others.  And when she stopped eating, stopped opening her eyes, stopped shivering, stopped moving, a voice opened the mirror and she lay still until the voice grabbed her, and she felt smooth hairlessness against her soft fur. As the voice pulled her tiny body closer she opened her eyes hoping the voice would see two mirrors.

V

When Jesus wept, sorrow expanded and Vishnu allowed cells to replicate and reincarnate into infinite variations of procedural cruelty, but on the night when the girl’s father died the rat with mirror eyes climbed the terrace into her room and lay softly against her arm. The two sisters slept and dreamt of an endless, empty ocean where nothing lives and nothing happens.