Daylight is Your Only Escape

A story of a skid row rat.

Image courtesy of the Hennepin County Library.

You run through the dark, through the tunnel built by those who came before you, the thousands who slowly chewed holes through one wall after another until your generation could cover seven square miles without ever going outside. In the dark, there’s just the sound of your claws scratching. There’s no snapping of traps or stomping of men’s feet. None of that squishing cracking crying sound you’ve heard so many times before when one of your mates ran too far into the daylight.

You’re in the basement of a bar, and a pile of glass bottles rises like a great hill, thrusting toward the ceiling. Light from a solitary, grimy window spills over them, highlighting their curved necks. They’re blocking the next hole. You climb on them, looking for a way around them, and when one shifts under your weight, you scurry back down, hiding in the shadows.

A splintered wooden staircase is next to the mountain of bottles, but there’s nothing for you at the top of it. In the bar, men sit on stools all day drinking something brown and sweet. (You tried it once, and it made you sleepy.) They spit on the floor. They slump over and other men drag them out, but they never eat anything. They never drop anything you want.

You sniff the air. Coffee. Where there’s coffee, there’s stale bread. Something you want is nearby, just not here, and you’ve got to go through the next hole if you’re going to get it. You climb on the bottles again until you find the hole. When you push aside the bottle that’s blocking it, the whole mountain shifts, and as you leap into the cave, the bottles come crashing down, rolling over each other until they cover the entire floor.

You keep running. The scent of the coffee gets stronger as you run from one building to the next. Other smells come and go: men’s sweat, baked beans, canned meat. Sometimes, they toss the cans out of flophouse windows, and they land in the alley. If you’re lucky, you find scraps inside them. Half a bean. A shred of beef. Once, you found a jar with three shriveled olives. They tasted bad but kept you full. The alley is all you know of “outside.”

You had a friend who lived inside the flophouse walls. An old man whose bed was next to the wall would leave bits of bread for him, and sometimes scraps of ham or cheese, or even candy. He’d crawl into the old man’s lap and get his ears scratched. It was a nice life your friend had, until a trap snapped his neck.

Now you know better. You know their game. They leave you food, and you start to think you can trust them. They even touch you and it feels nice, and maybe you can live alongside them, and then….snap. A slim metal bar comes down and it's lights out forever, or your feet get stuck in glue and you exhaust yourself trying to pull them out, until one of them comes along, covers you with a paper bag and slams his foot down, crushing all your bones at once. The poison, though, that’s got to be the worst. It smells so good and you think one bite won’t hurt, and then you slowly dry out inside.

When they catch a glimpse of you, you double back to the darkness. You wait. Sometimes, they leave food for you, discreetly, where they’re sure none of the others of their kind will see it. You take it, but only when you’re sure they won’t see you. That’s the only way this can work. You only eat it if it’s a piece of bread or a broken cookie. If it’s a brick that smells too good to resist, if it’s blue, if it’s a pill shoved into a cube of cheese, you push it right out of the hole, right out into the part of the floor where the sunlight hits it. You listen to them laugh and say things like ‘they sure are getting smart.’

Finally, you reach the basement of the cafe where the coffee is brewing. Once inside the wall, you run up, your claws digging into the lath. A small shaft of bright light shines through and you run toward it. For a moment, everything is white and glowing until your eyes adjust and the dirty tile comes into focus. You run along the base of the counter, in the space between the forest of steel barstools and the ledge where men put their feet.

The ledge is empty for now, but men come in and out of here all day long, so there’s no time for dawdling. You smell something sweet, salty and yeasty and run toward it. At the end of the foot ledge, there’s a forgotten chunk, sweet and cruchy on top, soft and bready underneath. Some man must have dropped it and decided the gritty floor had ruined it, but to you, it’s the best thing you’ve found in days.

You want to snatch it and scurry back into the hole and eat it while hiding inside the lath, but the little bell that rings whenever someone walks in just sounded, and now there’s a pair of scuffed Oxfords blocking your path. Worse, someone’s spotted you, and a broom hits the ground just inches from where you stand.

Daylight is your only escape.

You run, holding the piece of caramel roll in your mouth, dodging a slow-moving car as you dash across the cobblestones and into the cool grass of a small park. Men sleep in the grass, hats covering their faces, their bodies soaking up sun. You hurry away from them and start nibbling your caramel roll, but a squirrel bounds toward you, and you know he’s after what’s rightfully yours.

You run again, hoping for some peace at the other edge of the triangular park, but the squirrel follows you, and suddenly, you’re in the street, where cars barrel through, and you’re running faster than ever, the pavement hot against your paws, your jaw tiring from carrying the caramel roll.

Everything’s a blur, and you don’t know where you’re going, but you hear water and smell fresh earth, which you’ve never smelled before, but you know what it is because the older generations told you about it. There was a time when we all lived in the fresh earth, they said. If you ever get close to it, you’ll know, they said.

A car screams past you, and you dart out of the way of its front tire, dropping the caramel roll into the street. You want to go back for it, but another car comes behind the first, and then another, the sun banking hard off their metal and glass. You abandon your prize and leap over the curb, darting under a canopy of green leaves.

The sun is warm, dappling the ground where there are gaps between the leaves. You find a thicket with a soft green glow above and shade below, and you rest. You hear a rushing sound, and when you leave the thicket, you see a wide stretch of tumbling water and inch toward its edge. Cautiously, you lap it up.

It’s cold and clean, nothing like the rusty water you’ve sipped from leaky sinks and overflowing toilets.

A squeaking sound makes you raise your head, and you turn, and that’s when you see her: all white with red eyes. She’s hiding under a vine, half-hidden by leaves. You run toward her, sure she’ll dart away, but she doesn’t. She sniffs you and it tickles. Her white-as-porcelain coat is like nothing you’ve ever seen. Everyone you’ve ever known was brown or gray.

You watch as she reaches for a cluster of round, dark colored things, pulls one off and bites into it. You copy her. The round thing fits in your paws, and when you sink your teeth into it, the leathery skin slides off, and you taste the soft, sweet, tart flesh inside. You eat it quickly, and as she reaches for another, you do the same, until the cluster is half gone, and you can’t eat anymore.

Afternoon comes and the heat bakes the naked ground. You nap with her under the grape leaves where it's cool.

By nightfall, you wonder if you should go back to the tunnels, back to your clan, but instead, you follow her. You eat what she eats: seeds, berries, grasshoppers. You sniff ivy that clings to the trunk of a tree, but she ignores it, so you do too.

Two men crash through the brush and stand by the edge of the river, drinking and singing. One tosses an empty bottle into the water, and it makes a small splash before the current sweeps it away. You run past them and they notice, but out here, they don’t care.

Moonlight illuminates her white body and translucent whiskers as you follow her to a hollowed log, where it’s dark and cool.

You dream that you live inside a flophouse wall. A man’s bed hides the small hole you’ve made, and when you peer out into the light, you see his big face as he bends to look at you. He whispers and hands you a morsel that looks small in his hand, but you have to hold it in both paws. It’s two pieces of bread with peanut butter and grape jelly in between. You eat it and he scratches your head. But later, you watch from your hole as he leaves something in front of it. You sniff it, and you like the smell. It’s a strange color — blue — but you bite it, and it instantly burns your mouth.

You wake up, and your heartbeat slows as you realize you’re still inside the dry hollow log. You won’t go back. The log, the riverbank, the grapevines, they’re your home now.

You turn and look for her, but you’re alone.