We Could Be Rats

by Emily R. Austin

I did read this book once where a rat goes on a veritable smorgasbord at a fair. He feasts on candy apple cores, salted almonds, and rejected hot dogs. He’s a gluttonous rascal, so he has the time of his life, wolfing down trash until his belly distends and he becomes a fat rat ball. 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.

Now I’d say traipsing around town with Greta is as close as I got to eating carnival trash.

Picture that I wrote this with a happy heart, sipping an iced coffee, eating a donut. That’s the truth. I’ve got a Boston cream clamped between my front teeth right now. I’m eating it hands-free as I type. I’m scooping vanilla custard out of the fried dough with my tongue. I feel happy.

I watched those guys approach girls my age as if I were watching feral hogs in rut. It felt both disgusting and depressing to witness a pack of drunk boars pester piglets.

Before caterpillars become butterflies, they turn into guck in their cocoons. 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 wasn’t the type of kid who wanted to be a teenager. I wanted to be a kid. I felt sort of trapped inside my new adolescent form, and worried about how torturous the rest of my life would be, jailed in a grown-up’s body. I grieved for my toys, and for the person I was the year prior. I felt like I was dying and being reborn as someone dead-me couldn’t stand.

Love

My friends and I had drifted apart too. When we were kids, we bonded over our shared interests in pretending we were all witches, and in making up imaginary pet dogs. During middle school, that changed. Every conversation was about which boy they had a crush on, diets, and TV shows I didn’t watch. I found myself listening quietly to conversations, picturing our imaginary dogs lying lonely in a corner, all our magic draining from our feet.

Sad!

I had these visions of myself on the moon, in a big city, or in the ocean. I wanted to migrate, like animals do, to an environment better suited to my nature. I wanted to live near something exciting—like shooting stars, jellyfish, or mountains. I wanted to look out my window and see something more interesting than potholes or dads mowing their lawns. I wanted to live among animals, or with aliens, or at least around people who had bigger things to do than spray pesticides in their gardens, go to church, and complain.

shared a bedroom with Margit. She didn’t like to play the way I did, so I spent most of my time alone beneath the house, constructing a miniature world for my toys. Marg once stuffed a pillow under her shirt, declared she was with child, and said a bad guy was after us. She told me we needed to hide to protect her unborn baby. I remember crawling under her bed while she whispered to me to be quiet. She said, “Try not to breathe.” I didn’t like playing with her. I didn’t want to hold my breath, feel scared, or pretend Margit was grown enough to be a mother. I preferred to imagine we had magic powers. I wanted to pretend we were happy lizards, eating bugs, or something.

If only

She was only one year older than me, but I felt like she was elderly, and I had just been born. Adults used to tell us that one day we’d be close, but that never happened. There were times when I thought I hated her. If we weren’t sisters, we probably wouldn’t have been friends. Though maybe it’s harder to be friends with someone who you shared a bedroom and parents with. Maybe if we had met as adults, things would have been different.

I remember running home, pretending that the snow on the ground was icing. We played that we were two little candlesticks slipping on an icy cake. We shrieked “Happy birthday!” as we skidded down the road, imagining our winter hats were candlewicks on fire.

I’m not sure why we tell kids everyone’s so unique. We aren’t really. I get wanting to make kids feel special, but most people are more of the same. It might be easier to grow up if kids weren’t sold this tall tale that we’re all exceptional. It might make it less jarring to become an adult if we knew the truth the whole time. We’re mostly ordinary. Do you think of this kind of thing when you think of snow? Do stories containing snowflakes make you feel dull and average now too?

Empath

I wasn’t a difficult person around other people. In fact, I don’t think anyone outside of our family would describe me as exhausting or dramatic. I think you might have a warped perception of me. People saw me differently than you saw me. I saw myself differently than you saw me.

think, for Mom and Dad, a girl who has it together is someone on course to meet societal expectations. She’s on track to have a good job, a house in a nice neighborhood, a husband, and babies. I certainly wasn’t on that track.

neighbors. My parents were incensed. Any time they found a lighter in my pocket from then on, they thought I’d been out starting fires again. Meanwhile, I was just innocently making apple pipes and smoking weed in people’s garages. I found it strange that Drysdale devoted so many resources to one sixteen-year-old burning her homework, and so little to some of our bigger issues, like the opioid epidemic, homelessness, and rampant hate crimes, but I guess that’s none of my business.

I never really honed being well-mannered, did I? My instinct is to be direct, but that’s often rude. For example, you can’t say, I want to go now when you want to go; you have to say, Well, I’ve had a lovely time, but sadly I’m beat, even when you are an insomniac, or you’ve had espresso, or done coke, and know you’re going to be up for hours. Sometimes I think I accidentally made up white lies that were ruder than telling the truth.

“Creeps like us have to stay alive.” She always talked about how important it is for there to be creeps roaming the earth. I don’t know why she thought I was a creep. I think her definition of “creep” might be different from mine.

Are you mad at me? It’s okay if you are. Is my tone making you madder? I bet it is. I bet you’re furious. Your cheeks are getting so red. Turn around! I’m standing right behind you! Made you look. I’m not really standing behind you. I’m dead.

More threatening?

Should I mention the cancer? I feel weird about that. Mostly because I don’t really have cancer. I just wrote that I did in that letter because I thought it would make things cleaner and easier to explain.

I should have started drafting this earlier. I’m a real procrastinator. I knew I was doing this. I planned to do it in January, but I realized that was too close to my mom’s birthday. You can’t kill yourself near your mom’s birthday. It’s insensitive. Then it was getting too close to the city’s election, so I stuck around to vote early last week.

Pushing it back again shows what?

My dying wishes for you are: Stop eating essential oils. Don’t vote for Kevin Fliner. Listen to people who have different experiences than you do. Love, Sigrid

A literal lol then gasp

I threw pie at Mom because I lost control of myself. When I was in that house, it was like I reverted back to being a kid. I felt immature, under attack, and crazy. I thought of my child-self, sitting cross-legged in the basement, holding a doll, listening to our parents scream at each other while you hummed that everything would be fine. I thought of what I’d do now as an adult if I came upon that scene; if I saw two little girls in that house with parents behaving like jackasses, and I snapped.

Remember how I approached Jerry about what we’d seen? I said, “Jerry, be honest, do people have sex before they’re married?” You elbowed my ribs, and Jerry was taken aback by the question, but she said, “Yes, honey. They do.” That was a revelation, wasn’t it? You and I gawked at each other like the time we unearthed where our tooth fairy money came from. You choked on your Froot Loops, and I hushed the word “fuck” for the first time in front of an adult.

Religious Trauma!

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,

You always said you were introverted, but I don’t know. You might just get tired carrying the mental load required to monitor everyone around you. You seem to spend every interaction scrutinizing every glance, every move, every word, every laugh. You seem compelled to help ease everyone’s mounting feelings; to distract people, to redirect conversations, to explain what someone meant when you notice a misinterpretation. You were always shushing me. Elbowing my ribs. I think it was because you watched Dad for signs of his temper rising. You paid attention to how hard Mom shut the cupboards, to assess her mood. It looked exhausting.

My approach to our parents’ tempers was to disengage, while yours was to dial in excessively. If our parents were a TV show, I was in the next room, chasing a butterfly, tuning out. You were pressed up against the screen, your hair static, your eyes wide and glued to the glass. Ultimately, I don’t think either approach was healthy. I think you’re neurotic and controlling because of it, and I was detached and delusional.

You and I were affected differently, and obviously I’m no psychiatrist, but I think the root causes of our issues are the same. I don’t want to be negative. I want this note to be uplifting, but I think ultimately it is uplifting to acknowledge this. I’m dead, and you could probably live your whole life exhausted, nudging people in the ribs, making up swamp-monsters, but I wouldn’t choose that for you.

Mom yammered on and on about how she was sorry we couldn’t afford that dress. She said she would try to make it. A few days later, when Marg and I got home from school, the dress was hanging up in our room. Spotting it felt like that moment in Cinderella, after her dress is ripped apart by her stepsisters and she opens her armoire to find that pretty gown stitched for her by friendly mice and birds.

Instead, she and I got high and walked around Drysdale, cackling like we were the town’s witches. We ambled all the way across town, stood in that cornfield on the edge of the city limits, looked up into the night sky, and pretended we were gnomes.

Magic

I wonder if my parents or Jerry will read this. I have a feeling they might not. It’s hard to tell with them. I think they’ll be mad I did this. They might refuse to read the note. Maybe, after a few years pass, if this is left somewhere they can read it without anyone knowing, they might. Who am I writing this for? Am I just writing this for myself?

Mom found a bag of weed in my sock drawer, and drawings she said were deranged. They were of anthropomorphic sharks eating people. I also drew the structure of a cell, except I drew two cells next to each other, and made them look like boobs. Mom felt that was egregious.

Among your things, she found thong underwear, which might as well have been a sex toy, and some skirts she said were, “Designed for strippers.” She also found both of our diaries.

christ

It was apparent by what followed that she read your diary cover to cover. She knew minor details of secret dates you’d gone on. She made snide comments about it. She said things like, “Maybe you should move in with that boy you’re secretly dating,” when you didn’t clean up after yourself.

Omg!

I had read your diary too, but I did so in secret. Because of that, I knew when Mom mentioned the boy you were dating that she had read the whole thing. You didn’t mention him until well after page one hundred.

felt like a lost animal released in an unfamiliar ecosystem; like I was a caught badger, driven miles away from my habitat, freed in a forest I’d never badgered in before. I had only ever existed in my house, my family, my school, my neighborhood, my town. My family didn’t have the money to go any-where.

They were just more uninhibited, unapologetically trashy, and seemingly happier. If my family were woodland creatures, we were a pack of badgers who lived under a shed in a subdivision and ate junk from suburban garbage bins. These campers were also badgers, but they lived free in the forest, where they ate mushrooms and worms. The subtle social differences shocked me.

learned that the way our school operated wasn’t the only way the world could work. People could be kind to each other regardless of status. It also helped me understand that in different settings, with different casts of people, our roles in life could change.

Greta, I doubt you’ll read this. If you do, though, I want you to know that I always cared about you. I associated you with running around town, laughing. I thought of riding on the back of your bike at dusk. No matter where we were, I always saw you as Campgrounds Greta.

A friendship love story

My mom came over after he left. She and Jerry griped about how disgusting men are, while we all watched romantic comedies and ate mint chocolate chip ice cream. Jerry ended up dating a man with a brown tooth and blurry tattoos on his forearms after Harry. I’m sorry, Jerry. As you likely now suspect, Harry was innocent. The culprit was me.

The girl I was seeing didn’t like cops either. She called them “The Pigs.” I always wondered why calling cops “pigs” was disparaging. I’d rather be a pig than a cop. Pigs are adorable. If anything, it’s a compliment. If I walked around town and everyone called me a pig, I’d think, This is amazing. It would feel like we were all playing some cute make-believe game.

So cute

I used to spend all my spare time rooting through my imagination. My bed was never a bed. It was a castle. It was a boat. When I looked up at the ceiling, I imagined the world was upside down. When I ate ice cream, I stirred it until it melted, and pretended I was shoveling mud into my mouth. I was rarely myself. I was a necromancer. I was a shark. A monster. I couldn’t wait to get home from school, descend to the basement, and hold a Barbie. Where does that creativity go, I wonder? Why do we lose that?

Nostalgic

Sometimes, I thought it was better to lie to spare people having to endure my attempt to explain myself. Maybe that’s a cop-out. Maybe I told myself that because it served me to think that way.

I accepted the oxy without putting much thought into it. Maybe deep down something inside me wanted to dabble more with self-sabotage, but mostly I think I was just bored. Greta kept doing it. It was strange. When it started, I thought she was sort of cosplaying as a Drysdale drug addict. I didn’t take it seriously. I thought she was sort of putting it on.

When you get older, the walls start to close in. You can’t really pretend to be someone anymore. There’s no more experimenting. You are who you are. Trying on new faces when you’re not a kid is risky. Masks meld onto your face when you’re a grown-up.

I played until I was thirteen, and I didn’t stop because I was bored, or because I grew out of it. I just realized that playing with Barbies when you’re a teenager is weird. I didn’t stop because my Barbies’ mouths stopped moving.

I didn’t want to say that I looked tired because there was a sentient poster of a turtle in my bedroom. I didn’t want to confess that I’d been staying up late swinging in parks with an insane girl who thought my name was Astrid, or that I’d lost touch with my best friend because she had developed a drug addiction. I was eyeing the twitching salt and pepper shakers in front of me. I knew while I watched them move that I had lost it, so I lied and said that I was fine.

something was obviously wrong with me. I didn’t know how long I would have before I stopped knowing what was real and what wasn’t. I had cracked. I was going insane.

I looked up at the sky above her. It was dark and the clouds were gray. God’s face had disappeared. When I looked back down, I joked, “Should we jump?”

thought everyone at that table looked slimy. When I went home and I looked in the mirror, I looked greasy too. Did you notice that? Did you ever see tentacles growing out of my head?

When I grew up, I realized I could never be a unicorn or a cobbler elf. I could never be a troll, an old man, an astronaut, a shark, or a rat. I would never be a girl who everyone liked. Those weren’t options for me. I was assigned the person I am.

This isn’t some miserable, self-loathing thing, it’s just that I don’t want this. I could handle being a broke high-school dropout, trapped in a conservative small town, surrounded by people who I find, and who find me, insufferable.