Rats

Are the rats dying? We’re watching them from the kitchen window, emerging from the black wooden box constructed over the pipes that they’ve taken for their nest to plunge into the drain where the shower water goes. Three rats, we think, two large ones and one small, all brown, their heads poking out of the box to sniff the air and then they almost slide down, very quickly into the drain. And then up again a moment later, snout first, sniffing …

Are they going into the drain to drink? We think so. But why are they so thirsty? Because they’re dying, we decide. We hope. For wasn’t poison laid down in that black box the other morning. Wasn’t it lain down there, in five spoonfuls, the top plank ripped from the box?

Rats! I was going to start a new category on the topic, like the one on damp. But my Visitor objected: it’s not funny, she said. You can’t make something funny out of it. And it’s true, the rats make us melancholic. Out of the window we look. Rats, sniffing the air. Rats plunging in and out of the drain. As though the world had ended somehow. As if it was already over and this is all there is.