Linger
The rats were in the walls. Your roommate, Curtis, set traps for them. Traps with cheese, like they do in the movies. We waited. We waited so long we forgot about them. The traps, not the rats. The rats walked around your Eugene house like they owned it, taking bites of your bread, shitting on the stovetop. But the traps. The traps got lost in the walls. One trap caught a rat, and it rotted.
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The first house Dad bought after Mom left him was built on the side of a mountain. The ground floor was the third floor, the first floor opened up to the backyard. The backyard had a jabong tree. Dad didn’t know it when he bought the house, but it had rats. Dozens of them. They lived in the jabong tree’s roots. They’d been there for years and were huge, two-feet long, grown fat on sweet citrus. I used to hear them at night, scratching in their den. I used to see them on the wall outside my window, their shadows running over my blanket.
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Curtis was upstairs when the rat fell through the ceiling. You and I were eating dinner in the basement. It landed on my steak. Its red eyes locked with mine. I heard it ask—what are you doing here? I couldn’t answer. You smashed it with a broom. You broke its leg. When it screamed, I screamed too. It dragged itself across the concrete and found a hole in the drywall as you were winding up to hit it again.
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I didn’t mind the rats. I liked that they had been on the mountain longer than we had. I thought of them as owning it. But one day I came home to a bulldozer tearing down the jabong tree. From the first floor, I watched as the bulldozer pushed and reversed, pushed and reversed, until the tree fell. Its roots were full of cardboard and cotton, leaves the rats had shredded for nests. A single rat darted out of the den, escaping to our neighbor’s. The rest were killed and stacked beside our fence, where they lay, limp and flat, until my dad bagged them up in a black garbage bag.
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I swore the rat you hit with the broom was the same one we found rotten, but you said that one had a longer tail. Whatever. All I know is that you and Curtis fought those rats for months. You fought me for months. Until you gave up. Now, I’m in Knoxville. You’re in Lubbock. Alone in my apartment, I think of you and the rats often. Curtis says they’re still alive. I’m happy for them, happy without them, but sometimes I wonder. Sometimes I think about what would have happened if we’d had a little more time before that rat fell down and ruined our dinner.