Hey, Dad!

There were many rats down there. You could hear them bustling about and squeaking, sometimes fighting and shrieking. Rats down there along with the mice, piles of wood, piles of papers and red pencils, large heavy books, the microscopes, little rectangular pieces of glass with mysteries splattered on them. Bottles of guts and worms and giant bugs and fetuses and many other pickled dead things that looked impossibly large, magnified by the formaldehyde they were preserved in. Sawdust, the giant lathe, tools, big saws, paper and more paper, and my father doing something with all of these, including a partially constructed dollhouse that had little tiny doors and windows with little tiny hinges that you could open and close.

The rats were multi-colored, pretty, not too big, and had long pink hairless tails and the white ones had red eyeballs. I want to feed the rats. Not the mice, because they were always sick and some had metal things stuck in them. When I asked my father why the mice were always sick he said because he makes them that way.

“Can I feed the rats?” I asked.

“Yes, you may feed the rats,” he said.

I’d watched him feed the rats, twenty cages of them. Big cages, maybe five to fifteen in each, some with mommies and their cute little rat babies. You have to lift the wire tops to get to their special little rat food dishes. The water tubes you can do from the outside. I already did those. I wanted to get inside, stick my hands down into the rats and feed them for real.

My brother watches from the door, leaning up against the door jam with that slightly amused contemptuous look he always reserves for me. Creep! I ignore him. To the fifty-gallon drum, lift the lid, fill the basket with the nice smelling, precisely formed little compacted pellets; the only food these fat rats have ever known and will ever know until they serve their allotted purpose, designed by my father their God. Where’s the little scoop? Oh there. Basket of neat little pellets and the scoop. He’s still standing there watching and smirking, I hate him!

To the first cage, untwist the wires, lift the lid slightly, push it back, reach in for the dish . . . Oh! Sharp little rat toenails dig into my hand and run up my arm, how many, seven or eight? Scrambling out, using my arm as a highway to freedom, while my senses and body revolt. I started shrieking, just like them. I hear diabolical laughter from the doorway. Stupid idiot! I flail, throwing rats into the air, flinging them off my body and then running though the sawdust, stumbling over piles of wood, trying to catch them as they scurry away, grabbing these no longer pretty, suddenly slimy little monsters, throwing them back into the cage, trying to keep them in as they keep running out. Impossible, I am really in trouble, I thought, as that worthless horrible mean brother doubles over in laughter, still at the doorway. Okay, they’re all back in . . . SLAM THE LID DOWN NOW, I think and I did. And the shrieking went on and on…Oh that’s not me, that’s one of them, Oh NO! No, no! I lift the lid. A rat nose melded to the lid, parted from a rat face, a face covered with rat blood. The rat with no nose drops to the floor of the cage and is instantly concealed by a pile of squirming brothers and sisters. I can’t SEE!! NO!! They are EATING it! Tearing at its belly, disemboweling the evidence of my incompetence . . .

I watch with fascinated horror, knowing what I am seeing, but still not believing it. My brother walks over, lifts the lid, reaches in and pulls out the rat, the one with no nose and not much else by now. As he lifts it and pushes back the lid, an impossibly long pink wormy thing dangles from its belly. He pulls and pulls at it, pulls it out and throws the body into the trash can. He holds the loooonnggg wormy thing up in my face, turns around and runs up the stairs, with it bouncing and trailing behind him, and me not far behind, screaming in anger at him and in terror of my father.

“HEY DAD!” he yells, “She fed the rats!” and he hands him the slimy wormy thing.

“Oh,” says daddy, “So she did,” as he removes the thing from dung-head’s hand and lays it gently on the dining table where he was grading papers. He spreads it out carefully.

I’m nauseous with guilt, waiting to be “struck down.”

He makes me sit down and look.

And thus followed my first lesson on the anatomy of the lower intestine.