Young Writers Society

The sky was mostly overcast but the sun still got through the grate and into the sewer. It showed all of the garbage piled up on the floor and a few stray rats that fed on it. I didn’t mind the rats. They did their thing and I did mine. As one of the few remaining inhabitants of the Danning sewer system, they were my only company when I was home. I didn’t have enough money to move after Danning crumbled, especially not to somewhere like Luciana. So I spent my days like a monk in the sewer, writing and musing. I wish I had more money. There just never was any in the sewer garbage.

My belongings sat on a ledge that was about twelve feet from the subway floor. I had a couple blankets, my notepad, a pencil, and some baggy clothes that I wore in all seasons. The ledge gave me some healthy distance from the garbage and the rats. I didn’t mind them too much, but they still smelled and the rats carried diseases. There was no way I could afford a doctor. When I woke up in the middle of the morning, I was cold and hungry. The woman’s shawl I wrapped around my neck to keep warm in the winter had slipped off, and I had tossed the blankets off of me while I slept. To eat, I always walked to the nearest town, Luciana. It was a small, well-funded suburban area that a lot of the richer Danning people moved to after the local government ran out of money. Sometimes, I’d do odd jobs in Luciana like painting a fence or trimming hedges to earn extra cash, but most of the time I just begged. I never got the chance to save money for anything since I had to eat.

The four mile walk to Luciana became a part of my life, like breathing. It was how I lived. It was a straight walk along the side of a highway that ran between it and Danning. The residents of Luciana paid for the upkeep of the roads that ran through Danning, but not for anything else. I didn’t have a way of keeping track of what day it was, but I figured it was a Saturday since there were children playing in the park that greeted you when you entered the town. Next to the park was the school, which all of the children of Luciana attended. A couple blocks beyond that was the steep Mercer Street, the unofficial town center. Shops lined the street end to end, from an old-fashioned ice cream parlor to a tax attorney. The street was on a steep incline, and the local boys liked riding their bikes down the hill as fast as they could without the concern of injury. This always reminded me of my sister and I trying to out-daredevil each other as kids by jumping off increasingly higher rocks into the East River.

I went to a deli and got a sandwich with some money I had earned from handing out flyers for some politician running for local office. He looked all-American, like a cartoon. I figured that was someone I could get behind. Didn’t hurt that he was paying me.

The park was my favorite place to eat. It was peaceful and, most of the time, bright. The blanket of clouds had cleared on my walk over and I enjoyed the winter glow. It also provided me with things to write about. I sat on a bench that was dedicated to a long-dead mayor of the town. Children played on the jungle gym. Sanitation workers in bright yellow vests picked up garbage. Old ladies shuffled along with goodies from the bakery for their grandkids. The wind swirled around all of us.

I ate half of my sandwich and began to walk back to Danning. As I walked through the park, the people I passed by looked at me for an extra beat, as if acknowledging my messy clothes and messy hair and messy face. I hated being pitied, but recognized this was also how I made money most days. The Christmas season was a good time to be a panhandler. But I, like the rest of the world, took weekends off, whenever I decided when the weekend was. It was hard work. One time a man asked me what it was like to be homeless after he gave me a dollar. “I don’t consider myself homeless anymore than you consider yourself homeless,” I said. Humans don’t have a natural habitat. Rats do; they belong in fields. So my neighbors were homeless. I wasn’t. I simply lived atypically.

Walking along the highway was never pleasant. The overgrown brush along the shoulder of the road tickled me for a quarter of a mile. It was irritating, but it also felt good to have physical contact with another living organism. When I got back home, I opened the usual cover that led to my ledge. I was greeted by a wall of squeaks. The rats must’ve been having a feeding party. These occurrences were annoying, but immersing myself in my pen and paper usually drowned out the noise. I climbed down the rungs of the built-in ladder, the squeaks amplifying with proximity. Once I got down to my ledge, I turned around to look at the rats. Before me was an ocean of brown chaos overlapping itself. Why are they brown? The rats had always been black. It was curious, but as long as the new rats weren’t aggressive, I didn’t mind. Observing a clump of them closely, I saw some very small ones. They must’ve been babies. The clan had to have come to feed on the infinite amount of garbage and waste on the sewer floor. There had to be a few thousand. And even then, there were probably more that were underneath the surface which I couldn’t see.

I took to my writing, which I always started with a journal of the day. Each day in the book was not dated, but rather labeled with an adjective that described it. “Normal” was how I described this one. I wrote what happened that day until I got to my walk out of the park. Remembering the people who looked at me when I walked by, I crossed out “Normal” and wrote underneath “Disheartening.”

The squeaking got louder over the next few minutes. Once I could no longer hear myself think over the echo, I looked over the landing. The black rats had come. Their dark coats were almost invisible in the dim tunnel, but my eyes had become accustomed to the level of light. At first, the black and brown rats were separated like water and oil. It did not take long for the two clans to mesh together to create what resembled a living coffee blend. I focused on the point where the brown and black rats met. It was hard to see in the limited lighting, but there was no doubt that the black rats were hostile. They must have been angry that their feeding ground had been overrun by foreigners.

There appeared to be more brown rats than black, but the black ones looked bigger. The brown rats were still climbing over each other, barely able to do anything without being pushed around in waves of rodents. The black rats formed into blocks which forged into the mass of intruders. It was hard to pick out what was happening, but I noticed a change in the tone of the squeaks. Instead of the habitual squeaking the rats made when hungry, it now sounded more aggressive and purposeful. As this went on, I began to spot many motionless brown rats being trampled and buried in the wake of battle by their enemies and friends alike. Even the baby rats partook.

I absentmindedly felt through my coat pockets and felt the other half of my sandwich. Curiosity struck me. What would happen if I introduced another variable? I didn’t want to give up my dinner, but now I was completely engrossed in the rodent war. I ripped off pieces of the end of the roll that didn’t look too appetizing. Tossing the bits of bread to different places in the wriggling mass, I witnessed eruptions like solar flares. Wherever the food landed, the violence magnified. The rats no longer discerned their targets. They turned on their own kind, scratching, slashing, and chomping at anything in their path to the bread. It evaporated into the chaos in seconds, but this didn’t ease the frenzy. It was certainly entertaining.

All over the battlefield, reddish-pink hues tainted the wall of brown and black. It seemed like the brown rats were suffering the majority of casualties, probably because they were smaller. In the back of the pack, some of them began to flee down the tunnel, away from the battle. The remaining brown rats had the choice of joining the exodus or stalling the horde of aggressors. Some fled, and others died in vain.

After a few more minutes, the battle was over. The black rats tore up the last of the stragglers. Corpses were strewn all over the concrete floor. Many lacked eyes, legs, or tails. Black and brown rodents were stacked on top of each other in haphazard piles. The corpses would begin to smell soon and I’d have to move to another area. My neighborhood had gone downhill.

Some of the victors began to feed on the fallen without discrimination. Others, mostly mothers, nursed their wounded children. I saw one rat sniff a dead black rat and lay on it, nuzzling its head into the lifeless body. I felt bad for the rats, but at the same time I recognized that this was what Darwin was talking about. Those that deserved to survive were the fittest. There were strong rats and weak rats. The strong rats fed their children the weak rats. And even though the black rats won the fight, they still lived in a sewer and ate garbage.