A/N: I have no idea what to categorize this as. It was written to accompany photographs inside a handmade book. I almost put it in short stories, but nothing happens, so it's not really a story... Oh, well. Enjoy ^^
before we begin all of this, one thing needs to be made perfectly clear.
we are not friends.
since the dawn of time, rat and man have struggled against one another; every day, you kill thousands of us- and every day, thousands more are born. killing us is a game to you. you may, in fact, become extraordinarily uncomfortable with this- when the exterminator comes with his poison and his rubber mask, you don't want to think of the lives that you are extinguishing; you focus on maintaining the pristine, immaculate cleanliness of your lovely little home.
allow me to introduce myself; my name is alfons. yes- i have a name just as well as you do, given by the mother i'll never see again. perhaps she's dead. most of my family is. i was born on 115th street in new york city, within the walls of a library. my siblings dispersed, but i crouched in the shadows and learned. i absorbed your language; i scuttled around the place at night and taught myself your words, written and spoken. perhaps my knowledge of your culture is the only reason i haven't been killed by poisoning or cats yet. in any case, i consider myself a somewhat cultured individual- i do live in new york city, the center of the world- and i must apologize for the condition of this book. i have somewhat limited resources, and i now live in the sewers beneath the city. it's all i can do to keep it dry, but i know for certain that no matter what it takes, this must exist. even if it is never found, i could not live with myself knowing that i didn't try. i just wish i had something better to offer- god, is it foolish for a rat to wish for something better? it's nothing that i have to offer. whatever i have, i suppose, will have to suffice, however frustrated it makes me.
by no stretch of the imagination are our lives easy. we cheat death each day; we are constantly aware of the threats lurking around us, however small. each shift in the wind stirs us; each rattle of a door or faint sound of a pawstep brings up our guard. we have grown into a cautious species, ever-alert and ever-aware. we're clever creatures; even your kind will begrudgingly admit that we are intelligent, even sly. little thieves, you call us- and perhaps you're right; i've taken a good many items off the street in my time. no matter how cultured they may be, there isn't a rat alive who can resist the lure of a shiny object. bits of wire, little glass marbles, keychains, all little treasures that you drop on the sidewalk for a thieving little pest to come along and pick up. it has become an unquestionable fact over the past few thousand years that we are stubborn survivors, unprepared and unwilling to die.
and what a war our stubbornness has caused. we are the harbingers of death for your kind. we crippled your population with our black plague in the 1300’s, and those who survived did so in terrible fear. over 600 years later, we have not been forgiven. we are avoided and slaughtered on the grounds that rats carry disease and filth, or because we are destructive; we ruin the perfect order of your home. it’s laughable, really- your sniffling, grabby little children are far more destructive and disease-ridden than i, and you seem to keep spawning those without complaint. do i sound bitter? hah, well, i certainly have no intention of flattering you, with your hideous hairless faces and smog-blowing machinery. just as you think of my kind as a singular unit, we group you as one. in fact, there are many sentiments that we share- in particular, the idea that each of our species would be better off with the other destroyed.
is it surprising that we hate you as much as you hate us? even that we would rather you were all dead? oh, don’t be afraid, we don’t have the same tools of mass genocide as you do. you have people whose sole occupation is to find and kill us by thousands. you have made sports out of murdering us. in the 19th century, the sport of rat baiting was at the peak of its popularity. you put hundreds of us in a pit and set a dog loose. the dog which killed the most rats in the least amount of time was the winner. you placed bets on the dogs and sat around the ring, your wails of encouragement the last things my ancestors heard before they were tossed in the air, big ivory teeth cut straight through them. the owner would lift the dog out after a marked time period, cooing and congratulating and stroking their pet’s gore-streaked face.
today, our mass murder is treated with a sense of duty rather than merriment. you call your rat-killers exterminators; when you see us, you call them in with their cans of poison and tell them to kill us. you pay them to spray fumes into our nests and then come back inside, breathing a sigh of relief at the infestation you prevented. it’s not your fault, you’ll think; a filthy, disease-spreading creature like a rat needs to be taken care of before it can hurt the children. some of you stare at our dead bodies and laugh; some are too disgusted to look at all. perhaps some of you feel guilty, but you’ll ultimately get over it. all your friends convince you that exterminating us was really the right thing to do- what else could you have done? plus, we’re just so ugly; who could feel bad for killing us?
for those too squeamish to do the job themselves, mankind has invented the perfect engine to destroy our species- a creature who kills just as senselessly as you do, and for the sole purpose of entertaining themselves. my mother was taken by a cat. domestic cats kill more than any of their wild counterparts. the feral ones kill to stay alive; the others kill because it is in their blood. they wake each morning with a poison stir in their veins, and they simply cannot resist sinking their needle-sharp claws into anything that moves, whether it be a piece of string or a mother’s body.
it really is somewhat miraculous- how you have managed to breed the coldness of a human heart and the savage instinct of a wild killer into one little body. and at the same time, it’s cute enough for you to excuse any damage it does in your home- quite a bit like your kids, actually. the cats are not to blame. they were created to kill, and to fault them for doing so would be like blaming a gun for shooting someone. in both cases, it was man who pulled the trigger.
however much i detest your species, i am not stupid enough to be blind to the gray area. it is not rats against humans in all cases- there are those willing to look past the prejudices of eras past and treat us with respect. a kind human is a sanctuary; even those with nothing to almost give might have a cracker when you’re starving, or shelter you from a hunter on the prowl. i know a few such humans; they come and go, wanderers, outcasts and deadbeats in your society- our kings and queens.
perhaps my bitterness is too much. perhaps this is all in vain, or perhaps you’ll never believe that these words were born in the heart of a rat. but perhaps next time you dial an exterminator’s number, or shudder at the sight of our bald tails and beady eyes, it will be a bit harder for you to forget...
we, too, are alive.
