We Could Be Rats

by Emily R. Austin

I’m not sure I’d recommend taking the advice of an uneducated, twenty-year-old dead woman, but if you insist, I might say you should try being like a rat at a fair. To be clear, I don’t mean that you should gorge yourself on carnival garbage. I just think you should try to collect days like that. Do whatever will turn you into a rat ball, so to speak.

Greta laughed so hard I felt myself float, happy as a rat with a hot dog. At the time, I had no idea how few days like that we get. When you’re a kid, you assume you’re just getting a taste for all the memorable experiences life has in store for you, but the truth is, most people don’t spend countless nights running through the streets with their friends. They spend a handful of nights doing that if they’re lucky.

They don’t just grow wings from their caterpillar worm-bodies; their old body breaks down into a liquid, and their new body forms from the remains. I felt like I was guck, and my body was a cocoon. I felt like I was absorbing myself, becoming a whole new bug, and I didn’t want to be. I preferred to be a worm. I liked my worm-thoughts. My worm-body. I didn’t want to change.

I need to be forthright because I think there might be some weird AIDS hysteria surrounding that and organ donation. They might not accept my organs. That might only apply to gay men, but I’m not sure. If it were up to me, I would lie to the organ donation people. I would tell them I was straight. It seems a shame to waste a pile of perfectly good, life-saving organs, doesn’t it?

I googled the cost of caskets, and it’s criminal. Please bury me in a garbage bag.

The problem is, I think one of the benefits of growing up with a sibling is having a witness. It’s nice to have someone to cross-reference your childhood with. I feel guilty leaving you alone. I wish I could stay to corroborate your memories.

Once, before we went to bed, you told me what an empath was. You said you thought you might be one because you always had such a good grasp on what other people were thinking. I agreed with you at the time, but now I’m not so sure. I think you just read the room, monitored facial expressions, and tried to anticipate how other people were feeling, because our parents couldn’t control their emotions. You were on guard and tuned in to people out of self-preservation, because our parents behaved like temperamental dogs.

I prefer black-and-white rules. I would prefer to be told to never lie, rather than be told I should lie sometimes. I think when rules are gray, we think about them too much. Nothing is really right or wrong, or good or bad when you think about it too much.

I would have gritted my teeth and played myself. I could not, however, play that character and also be insane and all alone. It’s not the part for me. I felt like my dress rehearsal had ended, and I had grown up.

I want to be a garden gnome. I want to live in a hollowed-out mushroom. I can’t do that, sadly. I have to exist where I am, in the world I’m in. I think my options are to blow myself up, blow everything else up, or just endure it. I couldn’t successfully blow myself up, I don’t actually want to blow everything else up, and I don’t know how to endure it. I have to do something else.

She said, “Well, we’ve got all this research about how rats behave because we experiment on them so much. My roommate Candace was telling me about this. She’s a psychology major. It’s really interesting. She said rats help each other. They remember individual rats who helped them. Isn’t that cool? They demonstrate empathy and avoid harming other rats.”