Daylight is Your Only Escape, Part 2

The continuing story of a skid row rat.

Image by Malkhai Cora from Pixabay

Shades of violet brighten the pre-dawn sky as you search for her, the white rat who showed you how to live in the wild. She spent one perfect afternoon with you teaching you how to catch grasshoppers and warning you away from ivy, and went to sleep with you inside a hollow log, but when you woke up, she had vanished.

You sip from the wide black river. The first time you tasted the water, you saw her, hiding under a grape leaf. Maybe another drink from the river will lead you back to her. The rushing current fills your head with noise, drowning out any sounds from the city you left behind when you came down to the riverbank.

You’re hungry. You find one of the wild grapevines that crawl along the river’s edge and follow it until you encounter a cluster of grapes, and pull the round, tart fruits off one by one until you’re full. You hear a rustling, the footsteps of something bigger than you, and you freeze. It looks at you with its glowing eyes, its pointed ears silhouetted against the purple sky. Every muscle in your body tenses and you hardly breathe at all.

The thing turns away and you hear the sounds of its steps getting quieter as it moves further down the riverbank. You scurry to someplace safe, someplace dark, and hope the thing doesn’t come back.

When the dawn breaks, you return to the hollow log, hoping she’ll be there, but it's empty. You scramble into the log and settle into the dry, dark space. You don’t come out for the rest of the day. You lick your paws and wonder where she went, why she hasn’t come back. Your thoughts turn to the friends you left behind, the skid-row rats living in basements and inside walls, stealing food from floors and sidewalks and cobblestone alleyways, the rats who dodge traps, who run from thrashing brooms and leap away from stomping feet.

It’s better here. You’re sure of that. The water’s clean, there’s plenty of food and there’s none of that blue poison that’s killed so many of your generation. Plus, the sun is warmer and the air is fresh with the smell of earth and green things. But you don’t like being here alone, and if she won’t come back, maybe one of your old friends from Skid Row will. That means leaving the riverbank, though, and you’re not ready just yet. You know that if you leave you might not make it back.

As the sun sets again, you venture out and find some seeds to nibble on. A bird circles high overhead, its wide wings black against a red sky. It revolves slowly and reminds you of the ceiling fan in the cafe where you used to steal bread crusts and bits of pastry from humans who couldn’t be bothered to pick up what they’d dropped.

You watch as the bird suddenly descends, its talons scraping the surface of the water. The size of it makes you tremble. Its shadow is as wide as a human is tall. The raptor rises from the surface of the river with a shimmering silver fish in its talons, wriggling furiously to get free. That thing only eats fish. It won’t come after you..at least, that’s what you tell yourself.

You leave the riverbank, crawling up a slope under the cover of thorn and vine until you reach the curb. In the cobblestone street, you find the piece of caramel roll you dropped days earlier, only now car tires have flattened it, smashing it into the cobbles. It’s dirty and smells a bit like rubber now, and motor oil too, but you eat what you can of it before another car comes and you’ve got to dash across the street.

You run through the triangular park where the grass stinks of humans, leaping over empty bottles and carefully avoiding the still bodies of sleeping men. Under a tree, there’s an orange puddle studded with little bits that could be edible, but it smells awful.

You reach the other end of the park where you can see the stretch of grimy-brick buildings you left behind, the ones that have been home to your family for more than fifty generations. You cross the street and dash through a narrow alley where there’s a small hole in the wall and crawl through. You scramble down, your claws scratching the dry lath as you head for the basement. You crawl through the dark tunnels your ancestors built, running from basement to basement, past the piles of empty bottles, the dirty linoleum surrounding leaky toilets, the broken crates full of old junk.

Finally, you reach the flophouse where your friend lived in the wall until a human killed him, and where the rest of your clan lives in the basement, bodies pressed tight together inside an old, disused dumbwaiter.

You’ve been gone a long time, they said. And you didn’t even bring anything.

I found something better, you tell them. You should come with me.

Come where?

To the river. It’s better there. You should all come to the river with me.

Why would we do that? We have everything we need here.

Like what? Scraps of meat? Old bread? Moldy bits of cheese?

Sounds good to us.

But there’s something better. Clean water. Plenty of fresh grapes. Lots of places to hide.

No.

Won’t you at least come and see?

No.

But it’s better.

It’s not.

How do you know? You haven’t seen it.

If it’s so great, what are you doing here?

I don’t like being alone.

So stay here.

But…

Nobody’s going anywhere with you. Stay or go. But don’t bother us with this river nonsense.

Your body feels heavy, like the time a human threw a whole bucket of soapy mop water on you. You take a last look at their identical gray bodies all packed together, all staring at you with shiny black eyes. You know you could just forget about the riverbank and stay here where you’ll be warm and safe in the tight squeeze of your clan. But they’ll demand you go out and get food for them and bring it back here and you’ll have to go back to ducking snapper arms and avoiding glue traps and stealing food from creatures who don’t just want to kill you but eradicate you.

It’s better by the river. Sure, there are predators there, too, but at least you can get your own food and don’t have to be the errand boy for a bunch of dumbwaiter-dwelling ingrates who’ve never seen daylight.

Alright, then, you say. I guess it’s goodbye.

Don’t let the door hit you on the tail on your way out.

You take the nearest exit, a hole in the wall next to the dumbwaiter, and scurry up to street level. On the corner, two men in suits are standing under the streetlight in front of the building, pointing their long fingers at things and scribbling on pads of paper. They smell different from the men who live in the flophouse and sleep in the park. Like soap, and whatever they use to make their shoes shiny. One of them sees you and tries to stomp on you, but he’s too slow and you get out of his way easily.

You cross the cobblestones again, and race through the triangular park, then another set of cobbles. As you run toward the river with grape leaves as your shield, you peek through the greenery and see another one of those birds flying above the river, slowly circling.

Is that what happened to her? Did she leave the hollow log for water or food, only for one of those winged beasts to swoop down and snatch her right off the sand? The thought brings back that heavy feeling. A grasshopper, bright green and undeniably crunchy, flits into view, but despite your hunger, you don’t want it.

You return to the hollow log. It’s clean and dry and has that nice warm smell that wood has. It’s better than Skid Row, better than the dumbwaiter, even if you’re alone here for the rest of your life.

You drift off to sleep. In your dream, you shiver as the eagle’s shadow blots out the sun. Its razor talons make a scraping sound as they open and you wake up just as they close around your throat.

You realize the interior of the log feels warmer than it did when you first came in here, and there’s another soft body next to yours.

The white rat gently nibbles your cheek.

Author’s note: Read part one of this story here. Part three coming soon.