The Lemonwood Quarterly

Title image from Ida York Abelman’s Man and Machine, 1929. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY.

Nicole Rosevear fiction short story Rats

The rats are in the walls again. I hear them at night, their filthy little claws scrabbling around in the insulation or old newspaper or whatever is packed in there behind the paint and drywall. Three nights this week, some rat-attack vision has startled me out of the drift that’s the closest I get to sleep these days: they press their way through the wall near my head, or pour in on me from the ceiling, or come from the floor to wind their way up the legs of my bed. They’re never there, of course, but the fight-or-flight panic of it isn’t swayed by reality.

Morning comes too soon, my head cottony, eyes rimmed in gray and purple in the bathroom mirror. This has been true for weeks, since before the rats. I wonder if there is a study I can sign up for, someplace that would hook me up to machines, scan my brain, restore it to some version of itself in which it is not its own worst enemy. I call my landlord, Lenny, first thing, leave him a voicemail about the rats, about getting someone to deal with them, about how I haven’t slept, can’t sleep, am not sleeping. It’s the second, or maybe fourth, voicemail I’ve left for Lenny this week. He has yet to respond to any of them.

The heat and pressure of the shower loosens my shoulders, softens the tension in my arms and back. It seems within the realm of possibility for today to be better. There is coffee, after all, already percolating in the kitchen, under-eye concealer in my makeup drawer, and an overdue reporting project at work I might be able to finish today if I can focus. Maybe tonight will be the night I finally sleep. Some night has to be.

At half past eight, precisely on time, I’m standing outside my car, ready to leave for work. The sky’s blue and clear again, heat ripples just about to make their appearance above the asphalt, no relief in sight from this scorching stretch of August days. I open my purse to find my keys, but they aren’t in the interior zippered pocket or tucked under the front flap. They are also not attached to the clip sewn into the side seam expressly to hold keys. I’m elbow deep in the main pocket, fingers glazed with the remnants of an open Chapstick and have no hope of being less than ten minutes late when I admit I have no idea where my keys are.

“Fourth day this month,” Brad says, twenty-five minutes after I finally find my keys in a jacket I don’t remember wearing this week. Twenty minutes too late. He is clicking a pen when I walk into his office, the office he’s summoned me to before I’ve slid my purse from my shoulder, my desk phone lighting up, his name flashing across the screen when I’m still half a dozen steps away. The staff’s theory that he doesn’t actually work up here, just watches us on the video cameras, stalking the feed for opportunities to micromanage, may be accurate after all. His pen clicking is metronomic in its regularity: click-click—ballpoint extended—click-click—ballpoint retracted. “You’ve worked here long enough to be familiar with our late policy, Ms. Mooney?”

I smile in a way I hope looks more benign than feral and breathe twice before responding, carefully measured inhales and exhales. “Won’t happen again.”

“Sam needs someone to do a mail run first thing. I volunteered you.”

“I’m ranking admin,” I tell him, “not some college intern.” He makes condescension look so effortless. I should be offended, but it’s hard not to feel a little awe.

“It’s in the job description,” he says. “Sam’s expecting you.” His pen-clicking rate doesn’t falter.

I haven’t done a mail run in years. In the service elevator, I hit the “B” button harder than necessary and wonder whether Brad would see if I flipped off the elevator camera. I’m more than a week behind on delivering the reports the internal auditors requested, a project that now certainly won’t be finished today.

I’ve managed to not think about the papers in my glove box this morning, but some twitch of my brain brings them front and center as the elevator doors close, interrupting my brief fantasy of letting Brad know via security camera exactly how I feel about this task. My husband, or ex-husband, or almost-ex-husband, had them served to me weeks ago, a series of unexpected knocks on the door moments before I would have been leaving for work anyway. It makes sense to sign them, even though I haven’t been able to bring myself to read them, the glue on the envelope still pristine. It doesn’t make sense to sign them, even though that relationship exists only in the past tense in every form other than this final, legal one. I never even brought them into my apartment, the new household I was still unboxing, deciding which kitchen drawer would be for towels and which for silverware, a space he had never entered, would never enter.

“Heather! There’s a face I haven’t seen down here in a while.” Sam’s greeting is when I realize the elevator has stopped, its doors wide open. I have no idea how long this has been true. Sam has run the mail room as long as anyone in the company can remember. His shoulders curl sharply forward and the skin on the backs of his hands is thin and spotted with age, but he weaves between the bins, carts, and boxes down here with a confident, practiced grace.

“Brad says you need a run?”

“Hectic morning.” His nod is slow as I follow him between bins and filing cabinets toward the back of the space, where he keeps the cart I’ll need to wheel to the executive mail boxes on each floor, get packages signed for by each recipient.

“Tell me about it.” The words are quiet, as much to myself as him.

He pauses, mid-reach for the clipboard that hangs off the side of the bin, its list of packages and destinations in neatly printed rows. “You look like you’ve had better weeks.” He’s turned around to face me, bushy eyebrows raised in question, waiting for a response.

“Rats in my walls,” I say. “Can’t sleep. Landlord’s ignoring my calls.” These are easier to talk about than the papers I haven’t signed. The rats, at least, don’t feel like a personal failure.

“They can smell you, you know. Don’t see too well, but rats have better noses than dogs do,” he tells me, more enthusiasm in his voice and the way he’s moving his hands than I’ve ever seen from him. “Can smell if you’re sick before doctors know you are.” He sniffs loudly, laughs until it becomes a wheeze. “Landlord sounds like the rat to me, anyway,” he says, unlocking the wheels of the mail cart with one foot.

“I don’t think I want to know that, Sam.”

“Tried poison?”

“For my landlord?”

Sam watches me until I catch what he clearly meant, my “oh” of realization falling flat in the quiet.

By the time I’m driving home, the glimmer of possibility I’d felt in the shower this morning has dissipated. I never got to the reporting project, and the concealer I applied before work has settled into the shallow lines around my eyes, making me look tired and ten years older rather than the just tired I would look without it. The morning coffee was good, at least.

I attach my keys into the key clip in my purse—no opportunity for them to hide from me tomorrow—and drop the purse on a chair in the living room. Standing in front of the open refrigerator door, erratic fast-twitch muscle responses shift and shiver under the skin of my forearms, thighs, places like my sternum, where I didn’t even know I had muscles. Tired, cold, hard to know what they’re a response to. I remember what Sam said about rats and smell and resist the urge to look this up in some online list of symptoms, pour myself a glass of water instead. Sleeplessness is thirsty work. 

From here, between the sink and the refrigerator, there’s a straight-shot view out the back patio door to the apartment’s shared yard, an uneven amoeba of tidy short grass with a few scraggly vine maples planted at its edges. It looks unfinished, an empty spot in the middle primed for a playground that never happened. That patch of bare grass was one reason I signed the lease here so quickly, a sharp pivot from the carefully curated plantings of the yard I was leaving behind, the house everyone told me I shouldn’t have been so willing to walk away from. It had seemed worth it, though, to remove myself from even one more minute of fighting about who would take what or who was the most wrong or the worst human of the two of us. The worst human, it turned out, was both of us anytime we were together in the same room, conversation, marriage, divorce. If there’s one thing we still share other than the slender legal thread tying us together, it’s almost certainly the wish that we hadn’t wasted those three years of our lives.

The last drink of water in my glass is still cold against my teeth.

In bed, I remember what Sam said about rats’ sense of smell and tuck the sheet close around the edges of my body, keep my breathing shallow to minimize the projection of toothpaste breath and then whatever it is breath smells like when the mint flavor fades away.

It’s not sleep, exactly, but after enough time lying in bed imagining all the ways rats can devour me, I drift, and then Lenny’s in the hallway just outside the bedroom door, a writhing wall of rats behind him. They tumble and tangle up and over and into each other, moving like mercury, a single organism separating and reconnecting. Lenny isn’t looking at me until, suddenly, he is, and his face grows longer and longer while we make eye contact, his nose stretching into a funhouse mirror version of itself, his whole face a rat’s face except for the curly blond hair between his rounded ears. The rats crest over him, a rat wave breaking in my doorway, rolling toward my bed. Sweat slicks the hollow of my throat and the creases of my elbows. I scream.

My alarm clock reads 3:16, and my heart’s hammering too fast. In the living room, I open the back door to let in a breeze, turn on every light and my computer, look up “heart racing,” “insomnia,” “muscle control,” find links to cancer, Lyme disease, impending seizures, side effects of medicines I’ve never taken. I open a new tab, type “rats smell sickness”, and skim my way through half a dozen articles about rats finding tuberculosis in human spit samples. When I turn off the computer, I press my fingers to my face, the tender skin beneath my eyes.

Despite yet another night of no sleep and too many rats, I do not forget my keys and I am not late to work.

Not that being on time matters. Brad calls me in before my computer’s booted up for the morning anyway.

There is, thankfully, no pen in his hand. “Fine job with the mail yesterday, Ms. Mooney.”

It’s not clear to me whether this is a compliment. “Yeah,” I say, but the word spills from my mouth, shapeless. My left hand twitches involuntarily at my side.

“Saw Sam this morning.”

I nod, unsure what might happen if I try to speak again. It’s hard to tell whether I’m standing upright or listing to one side, and it occurs to me that I could have looked up stroke symptoms this morning when I was busy not sleeping.

“He said you seemed overworked.” The way Brad is tilting his head more and more the longer I stand here leaves me certain I’m not vertical, but my body seems unable to correct this. “Do you want to sit down for a minute?”

“This is how I lose my job,” I think. The words tumble from my mouth without my permission, and I add them to the growing list of things I have said that I wish I could take back.

Brad looks as confused as I’ve ever seen him.

“I didn’t mean to say that,” I say.

“You’ve become less predictable this summer.” His voice slows down around the word “predictable” like it’s not quite what he really wants to say.

I don’t know how to respond to this, so I nod. No point disagreeing. Behind Brad’s desk hangs a triptych of botanical illustrations. The only one I recognize is milkweed, familiar from the house I left behind. We planted it for butterflies, but got tent caterpillars in the poplars instead. We planned a parking area for the friends we imagined we would have over, but punctured the gas line on our first day of digging. We talked in November about starting a family, but I moved out in June. The milkweed looms large above Brad’s head, slivers of morning sun highlighting a leaf here, a seed pod there.

He opens his mouth to speak, but looks away with a sharp jerk of his head, focused on the ceiling, then a wall to his right. “Do you smell something?” he asks.

For a moment, a trick of light through office blinds shows me long white whiskers on his cheeks, and Brad’s face gets tangled up in the lingering bits of the morning’s vision of Lenny, rat features sniffing out what’s rotten in me, what needs to be gnawed out.

I leave work early. Brad insists he is not firing me, but that I should take a few days off, get some sleep, come back when I can stand upright again.

Outside my apartment, engine off, driver’s side door open to the slight breeze cutting the heat of the parking lot, I open the glove box. The flap of the envelope unseals without resistance, the glue soft and gummy. I turn it upside down and let the papers slide into my lap, the pale stack of them a diseased limb. I sign everything marked with a colorful flag or swipe of a highlighter, don’t read any of it. The world closes tight and opens wide again with every signature. The end of possibilities. The beginning of possibilities. My stomach rolls with illness or recovery, too soon to know which.

That night, the ceiling light in my bedroom has stopped working. The rats are there again. There’s nothing the sound can be other than claws and teeth and tails, a nest—no, a colony—of small furry rodent bodies writhing between the wall studs. I picture them working their way to the wiring above the light fixture, exploring their new possibilities. When the gypsum cracks and crumbles beneath the weight of so many, I close my eyes and let them come.

Nicole Rosevear’s work has appeared in North American Review, Bennington Review and VoiceCatcher, as well as the anthologies City of Weird: 30 Otherworldly Portland Tales and Dispatches from Anarres: Tales in Tribute to Ursula K. Le Guin. She teaches fiction, composition, and literature at Clackamas Community College.