THE ITCH
by ESMÉ KAPLAN-KINSEY
It’s seven p.m, and the rats are hungry.
Every evening the same anticipation, as though the little brown flecks of kibble are heaven’s manna or the key to freedom from a life encaged. There was one stoned night that Roar, driven to masochistic curiosity by the buzzing desire of the little gray bodies, tasted a crumb of the food themself, and found it to be not that great. This was disappointing, because in some little-examined layer of their brain they had expected the consumption, based on rodent reception, to change their life. Instead things remained stable, no tectonic plate shifted even one millimeter by the grass-flavored grit on their tongue, which was weird in and of itself in retrospect because of how rare it is for things not to change, and in fact a negative change would have been preferable to Roar than none at all, but so it was. And still, even after the rat-food incident, the present frenzy of fur, the rasp of teeth on tiny metal bars, remains undeniable.
The beasts must be fed.
Roar thinks frequently of how strange it is, to keep beasts in your room. Of course, there are always beasts in your room, whether you like it or not—spiders and flies and gnats and mice in the walls and silverfish and house centipedes and anything else that might skitter across the floor and make you say eek. Or perhaps you draw the line of beast in a different place. Perhaps you would only accept a megafauna, and that is your prerogative, in which case the only beast in your room is yourself, which is rather lonely of you.
Although Roar never thinks of themselves as alone in their room, there’s something unnerving to them about the deliberate nature of the cage.
At Roar’s approach, the stinkers babies little fuckers darling dearests splay themselves against the bars, tiny hands—with thumbs! how quaint, how person-like of them—grasping for food not yet materialized. The two rats (Constantine and Tofu, technically are their names, but that’s really the least of the important things about them) are similar in ways that would confuse a stranger, in the dark gray shade of their fur and their popping shiny-black eyes, but different in ways that could be recognized easily by any friend: different shapes, different mannerisms, entirely different vibes. Roar rattles the food bag absentmindedly as they grab a handful of pellets, eliciting further expectancy, they imagine (constantly they attribute emotions to the rats, which they must continuously then acknowledge are closer to slander than empathy). They scatter the handful, one handful being the default unit of rat feeding, through the cage’s slatted top, and watch the feast begin.
It occurs to Roar that they are hungry. It occurs to them that they have not had sex in what feels like a long time. These data points feel related. It has perhaps been three weeks, since Roar last fucked, three weeks in which they’ve eaten, drank, smoked, ridden the bus, walked once down to the river to put their feet in the oil-slicked water, passed a few pleasant evenings playing cards and yapping on Iris and Arizona’s legendary front porch, and otherwise spent so many hours behind their computer screen, spreadsheets and newsletter composition and email blasts for work, followed by television and YouTube and general brainrot, that they have at moments ceased to conceptualize themselves as a being with a body.
It occurs to them that today they have not left the house even once. It occurs to them that they have spent the whole day feeling genderless. These data points are related. The thing about online work is that because it is disembodying it is also degendering, each digital citizen represented by symbol rather than somatics. The thing about sex is it makes you remember you have a body. This is the opposite of a neutral fact.
But there are other ways to remind the body of its own existence, easier ones, safer ones. Roar opens the bedroom window, willing the night air outside to slap them across the face, but instead the wind is warm and it’s May and it’s not even really dark yet. In the corner of the room the rats are settling into their meal, movements fading from frenetic into content.
Roar puts on socks and shoes and tiptoes through the apartment and out the front door. They sprint around the block, which is a thing they discovered in high school (era of crop tops, unsexy boyfriends, virulent self-hatred) to be very effective for remembering your body, because it unsettles and activates all your organs and makes you aware of their constant subconscious operations, and because it is distinctly embarrassing in a physical way, not least because Roar knows they are one of those people who, when they run, look like they are fleeing something terrible rather than exercising, but also because it is a vulnerability, really, to go out in public and run like the animal you are, a creature born into a corral who one day sees the gate swing open and thinks now.
Roar careens back around their corner, past the overflowing dumpster and the row of pink-blooming crepe myrtles, and stands hands-on-knees on the stoop of their apartment, breathing hard in a pleasant way, waiting for the dusk to make some sort of increased sense against their skin. It’s not working. They go inside, toast a piece of bread, think about how you verb the bread so hard the bread erases itself and the verb becomes noun, eat the piece of toast. Not working. Fry and eat an egg with excessive amounts of hot sauce, drink a glass of water with enough ice to ache the teeth. Not even that working. The problem is that what they really want is sex.
They go to the bathroom and rifle through all the drawers, where they find a face mask belonging to one of their roommates and a tube of green tea flavored lip balm. They apply the latter heavily to their bottom lip because it seems like it might help with something, and then become immediately repulsed by the texture and wipe the whole thing off with toilet paper, but can still sense it on the skin around their mouth and feel very foolish.
The eye mask is promising, even if its disappearance might displease a roommate in some possible future. The eye mask could be the answer, the correct sensory input. Skin is a semipermeable membrane, after all. This could work, yes, yes.
Instead, Roar places the mask back in the drawer and picks up their phone. Opens the dread app. Funny, how the screen makes connection possible and impossible at the same time. In the cage in the corner of the room, the rats are still rustling. Unquestionably, they are having a conversation in a language Roar can never hope to learn.
When they were nine years old, Roar’s father brought home a dog, a shaggy little mutt with human eyes. For a year, it became her mission—no, their mission, they are always misgendering themselves in memory, which gives them a degree of sympathy for their poor confused parents who struggle so with the words and the weight they carry—to teach this dog to talk. It was insufficient, in their child mind, to wrestle and run with the beast, to sleep in beds full of dog hair and pick up poop in plastic bags—no physical closeness was sufficient, they wanted to know what the dog was thinking, feeling, not just doing. Day after day Roar lay on the floor with the dog, nose to nose, eye to eye, teetering on the edge of understanding, it felt like, whispering what do you want to tell me? I can tell there’s something you want to tell me. They held lessons for the dog on the living room floor with a little whiteboard and a Sharpie: here, a drawing of a door, and here, the marks that represent the sound that represents that representation of a door. Here, a drawing of a dog, three curves and a wagging tail, which is just like you, dog, because we call it by the same sound. Doesn’t that make sense? Doesn’t it? Eventually, Roar realized they’d taught the dog nothing, and also they had nearly forgotten how to speak. Every word got lost on the way from the thought to the mouth, in the gap between real and representational. Why was a door called a door when the word door, short unmelodic sound that it is, has nothing, nothing to do with the thing you shut between yourself and the rest of the world? Finally one day Roar’s father, listening to them tripping over yet another simple phrase, remarked you know it’s okay for things to go unsaid sometimes, and just like that, the weight of articulation, that necessary impossibility, lifted from their shoulders, and they could speak again, when they chose too, more carefully this time around.
The dog lived with them for two years and then one day Roar’s mother left the front door open and the dog ran out into the street and was run over by a Prius. All of those things— the door and the dog and the street and the car—were things, not words. The things happened, and the language came afterward.
Two hours after the skin-care defeat, Roar is fucking a stranger in a stranger’s bedroom, but a nonzero percent of their consciousness is at the 7-Eleven. In the corner store at the intersection of two lines of thought, right down the street from the roundabout they frequently circle in their mind-car, not to be confused with their real one, their consciousness is getting one of those giant slushies, a red color-texture never encountered in nature, drinking it up through a straw. The tongue of their consciousness is stained red, which is something that seems like it should only happen to children but happens to everyone anyway, even immaterial projections. Roar extends their tongue, their real corporeal one, from their mouth, and the stranger seems to appreciate it.
The stranger’s name was K on the app, which could stand for anything, could be Katherine or Keaton or Ketamine, for all Roar knows, which thrills them in a sort of shameful taboo way, the stranger in question having three fingers inside their body as they chase the name through the back alleys of their brain and come up empty. It’s also entirely possible their name is simply K, standing for nothing but the person, which feels somehow radical, in alignment with K’s fire-red mullet (slushie-colored, almost) and septum-eyebrow-lip piercings. Roar, watching the metal in their face flash in time with the fucking, suddenly desires metal in their own face—how cyborg would that be?–then rules the hypothetical out over the inevitable ordeal of actually putting a needle into their flesh. They can’t even stand tattoos. They can’t even stand face masks. Skin is too semipermeable of a membrane. It’s scary.
Back to the body and the things it’s doing.
On the wall of K’s dim blue-lit bedroom is a Kate Bush poster hung next to a black leather flogger, which strikes Roar as really quite funny, a crosssection of personality that appeals to them ironically and also unironically, specific and intimate enough that for the first time all night they decide to look the moment in the face, put their hand around the back of K’s neck and pull their forehead down towards theirs, and K’s eyes are narrow and hungry in a way that tugs something loose in Roar’s stomach which has nothing to do with their mind, in a way that drags them right out of the 7-Eleven and back into embodiment, and they actually look at each other then, with all their sweat and acne scars and dysphoria and want, and the pronouns get confusing here, and that’s how you know things are going as they are supposed to, and they’re saying it out loud now, how good things are going, louder and again and again.
Then it is done and there’s a towel pulled quickly from the laundry basket and a take-it-or-leave-it that was fun let’s do it again sometime and a quick chaste kiss at the door and then Roar is back in the car. Their car is an old Corolla named Adam, like the first man. They drive to the 7-Eleven, but the slushie machine has a big OUT OF ORDER sign on it. The guy behind the counter catches Roar’s eye and shakes his head, mournfully, as though they once shared something profound, and now have lost it.
The next day is a wash, no other way to describe it, or many other ways, but none so succinct. On the one hand, Roar’s body is back for the time being, as in they can feel the slight grit on the kitchen floor underneath their bare feet while they’re toasting bread into toast, can taste the toast, jam and everything, can enjoy the rainstorm of the shower on their shampooed scalp.
On the other hand, the rats have mites. They’re itching themselves bloody, that’s why Roar notices it first. When they take Constantine out of the cage, comb through her thin dark fur, her skin swarms with bugs just this side of microscopic. Alone, they’d never spot one, but the critters have reached critical mass. Tofu is no better, quite possibly worse, her haunches all scabbed from scratching. Watching the miniscule creatures crawl over the less miniscule bodies of the rats, Roar is suddenly sensorially convinced that they themselves are also covered with bugs. Perhaps the mites have filled the whole apartment. Perhaps their numbers will tip over the edge into visibility and then Roar will have to contend with their constant company, as the rats have been doing already, in greater magnification, for who knows how long. Even the rats are never free from the immediate presence of other beasts. Probably even the mites are never free from the presence of other beasts, microscopic to Roar, tiny to the rats, comrades to the mites. It’s beasts all the way down.
YouTube says the easiest at-home solution to rat mites is to douse them in olive oil. The video also says mites are common in pet rats, generally harmless, and do not feed on humans, which does little to ease Roar’s itching. Roar puts the rats in the bathroom sink and pours oil over them, working it into their fur with their fingers and whispering sorry sorry sorry. The rats detest it. They try to climb up Roar’s arms to escape, tiny claws shredding the skin (semipermeable membrane, permeated) but they are slippery with oil and shitting themselves with fear. By the end of the ordeal the sink is full of soap and blood and oil and piss and everyone hates each other. Roar puts the rats back in the cage and watches them groom each other’s fur and give them the stink eye. It all seems warranted. Roar feels like they have just committed a torture, because there is simply no way to explain to the rats why this oil spill has occurred, no way to link this fresh disaster to their bug-borne discomfort. Rather than a problem and a solution to it, it is as if two terrible things have happened to the rats, two plagues, the pestilence and now the oil raining from above. Today Roar is a malevolent god, and there is no path to forgiveness. Who does God ask for forgiveness? The best they can hope for is that the rats will quickly forget.
In the evening, Roar drives Adam over to Arizona’s house. This is what they do when they want to remember that they are in fact a person in society, with all the various joys and difficulties that brings. Walking into Iris and Arizona’s living room always feels like a small revelation, or perhaps a small revolution. Everywhere there are plants, Arizona’s paintings, posters advocating queer anarchy. Iris has made carbonara, delicious enough to temporarily resituate Roar in their body. After dinner, the three of them settle on the porch swing as they usually do, passing a joint back and forth, people-watching, storymaking, taking hits of things to think about. If this is queer anarchy, Roar finds themself thinking, sign me up. On this porch, their skin doesn’t itch at all.
Iris and Arizona are the only two people from college Roar still speaks to. Everyone else they’d met had promptly left this city for any other city after graduating, this city being deficient only in that it had been the location of their undergraduate educations and was therefore riddled with all sorts of shame. Arizona stayed because she’s something of an up-and-comer in the art scene, a gifted painter, a builder of public surrealist installations (grounded in theory rendered illegible in the final products, though Roar would never say it aloud), successful enough to put a down payment on a house and get a little hopeful about doing this forever. Iris stayed because they love Arizona enough to make nearly anything worth it.
Roar stayed because they couldn’t really think of anywhere else to go.
“Did I ever tell you guys about my dog?” they say now, as a man walks by the porch with his poodle. “The dog I tried to teach to speak?”
“Only fifty times or so,” Iris says, expelling smoke out the side of their mouth.
Roar is startled by this. They had thought the dog story to be deep lore, couldn’t remember the last time it had risen up from their subconscious before yesterday. Perhaps it is foundational in a way they don’t quite understand. Underneath their feet, they are aware of the white-painted boards of the deck, their constant slow decomposition. The poodle is peeing in the agapanthus next to the sidewalk. Its owner looks like he is dissatisfied with being alive.
“It’s funny you bring it up now, though,” says Arizona. “I’m researching for a new exhibit, about chosen names. How putting new language to a thing remakes it. You know?”
They look at each other, the three self-named entities. A state, a flower, an animal sound. What had Roar been thinking, when they renamed themself? Really, only that their parents had named them Aurora and they thought it was stupid and ugly all their life and gave it a remix. Nothing to do with noise, lions, anger, just a sound they liked the sound of. And Arizona named herself after the iced tea way back in high school, Roar knows—they don’t think she’s ever even been to Arizona. So the name is not about desert or cacti or sun or ecosystem in any way, just caffeine and sugar really, but isn’t that enough? And Iris used to be a boy who thought flowers were pretty and now they’re a notboy with a flower for a name. It’s funny how things happen like that, how language floats around and attaches to materiality in unexpected places.
The joint has burned down to a little stick of ash. Iris and Arizona sit with their legs overlapping. They are such a unit, it’s remarkable.
“I had good gay sex last night, you guys,” Roar says, into a long silence.
“Hallelujah,” Iris says, solemnly. In the fading light beyond the porch, a straight couple sways past, bodies entangled even in movement, a delirious two-headed beast.
“Hallelujah,” Arizona echoes. “Hallelujah for good gay sex.”
Roar wakes up to the itching.
They are half asleep as they become conscious of it, and so the information reaches them from a weird fourth dimension in which they are a rat and the itching is their own fur teeming with mites. In the quasidream Roar sits back on their haunches and scratches, scratches, scratches with one long rodent foot. Then they wake up and morph back into a human being beneath a blanket, and then it occurs to them the itching is real, and located entirely between their legs.
Roar goes to the bathroom, strips naked, and searches their skin for bugs. There are no bugs, only itching. Unless the bugs are invisible, which seems not entirely impossible, which means they could be anywhere at all, or even everywhere. When Roar pees, it feels like an entering sharpness, no exit.
They text Arizona, if it hurts when I pee do I have to go to the doctor?
Girl duh, Arizona writes back. Like right tf now.
But first there are dishes to wash, emails to respond to, a monstrous spreadsheet to update. It is a busy day, too busy for health complications, very inconvenient for their body to pick this morning. Truth be told, Roar finds the prospect of telling a doctor their condition more uncomfortable than the itching itself. And is it really even a medical complaint? Where does the itch live, on the skin or in the brain? All day yesterday they’d been itching at the mere thought of bugs. A doctor can’t do anything about that, maybe a psychiatrist, with their little orange bottles of brain-boosting pills, but you can’t go to a psychiatrist and tell them it hurts when you pee, except what if you made the whole thing up, in which case you are actually in the right office after all?
Really, Roar is worried they will go to the doctor and the doctor will tell them they invented the symptom. That would be really quite embarrassing. That would be like the mites had taken up residence in their brain.
But by the end of the day, though, the itch has taken on a fiery edge, and there’s a beginning of a weird smell, and Roar is distracted enough from their distractions—sweeping, making the bed, running the rats through a roll of paper towels so they get all long like weasels, which delights all three of them, their ordeal of yesterday a thing of the past—to google clinics near me and book an appointment for a checkup tomorrow morning. This strikes them as remarkably similar to an online hookup. You type in a few phrases, you set a meeting time, then you drive to a room with a bed where a stranger tries to figure out what the deal is with your genitalia. Sometimes reassuring, often embarrassing, unfortunately necessary with some degree of regularity. Roar is faintly aware this is a less than helpful paradigm for thinking about doctors, or hookups for that matter, but they stay amused by it because the other option is a spiral into disembodiment, which they are hoping to avoid. In any case, the rats are doing much better than yesterday. Their fur looks fluffy and clean and beast-free.
By the next morning, the itch has escalated to an undeniable burn. At the clinic, a blue-clad nurse writes down Roar’s symptoms and then asks, “What kind of sex have you been having?”
Disembodied? Mediocre? Occasionally transformative? Occasionally compulsive? Awkward, lazy, less frequent than they’d like? Silly, goofy? With condoms? Without condoms? Regrettable? With various people with various sex organs—is that relevant? Validating, invalidating, gendering, ungendering? Hard rough soft sweet messy? Adequate, inadequate? Just the essentials?
“Um,” Roar says, “gay?”
“We mean oral, vaginal, anal,” says the blue-clad nurse. “So we know where to swab.”
Roar feels spooked by the collective pronoun. The swab is only painful in that it involves taking one’s pants off in a doctor’s office. Then Roar is sent to the waiting room while the test is running. They sit in an uncomfortable floral armchair and try to discern the health complaints of the other waiters. Most people look perfectly fine physically, but emotionally like they are in pain. Roar wonders if they look like that, or if one of the waiters could intuit why they are at the clinic. They do their absolute damnedest not to itch.
The results take thirty minutes to arrive. The nurse calls Roar back into the office and tells them they have gonorrhea.
“It sounds a lot worse than it is,” she says. “It’s highly treatable.”
“It doesn’t sound too bad,” Roar says. And it’s true: it’s just a noise. The itch is that much less frightening just for having a name.
“It’s a bacterial infection,” says the nurse. “It should clear up with antibiotics in a couple of weeks.”
Roar envisions the bacteria, tiniest possible beasts, running rampant through the tissue of their body. So Roar has been turned inside out, or their insides have become public real estate, something like that, or nothing has changed and it is only their perspective which has inverted. So there really is no property line, no personal space, no boundary within their body that cannot be crossed. So the gonorrhea is the mite and the antibiotics are the oil, a flood sent to clear the landbody of life. So skin really is a semipermeable membrane. Oh God.
So are we just mites on the body of the earth, then? Are rising sea levels and global temperatures antibiotics operating on a geological time scale? Does our constant scrabbling make the earth itch?
The cure for gonorrhea turns out to be an injection straight to the ass, so Roar is compelled to drop trou for a second time. They lie facedown on the crinkly paper covering the reclining chair, and the nurse gives them little uncaring words of warning—here we go, are you ready, just relax—and then proceeds with the stabbing. It hurts. If it didn’t hurt it would be strange. A healing kind of pain. Roar has never been so aware that their left ass cheek is in fact connected to the rest of them. It’s over in a matter of seconds.
Feeling filthy, Roar washes their hands and their face and their neck with water from the sink in the clinic bathroom, water which was once an ocean and once a river which propelled biocides into the earth. Later the water will be some of those things again, probably.
As they drive away, Roar swears they can feel the bacteria, freshly named, rolling down the highways and byways of their own body.
“It’s really truly not a big deal,” says Arizona, when Roar calls them from the car in tears. “In sophomore year of college I got chlamydia twice. Remember that?”
“Yeah, that’s because you were a slut,” says Roar. They’d never call anyone that but Arizona, kind of like how Arizona can call them girl and they feel seen but anyone else calling them girl would carry the emotional tenor of a stabbing.
“It’s true!” Arizona giggles. Roar can hear Iris laughing too in the background. “And look at me. I’m fine! Better than fine—I’ve got silly stories! You will too, soon.”
“It’s nothing to worry about, for real,” Iris chimes in. “Just one possible outcome of sex, you know? Certainly not the worst one.”
“I feel like I’ve been invaded,” says Roar.
“Imagine how you’d feel if you got pregnant,” says Arizona. “That shit’s alien, man.” “Literally don’t even remind me my body is capable of that. Thanks.”
“Have you told them?” Iris says. “The person.”
Roar has not even thought of this, and while considering the sudden possibility that they are an irredeemable person, they nearly crash into a stop sign. That certainly would not help things, although it might expand and diffuse the problems in new and interesting ways—if they crashed their car, for example, would they be warranted in not texting K until tomorrow? The end of the week? Perhaps they are irredeemable.
“I’m going to tell them right now,” they say into the empty air of their car. At least Iris and Arizona will never know the scope of their interior moral failings. But then the pair of them had never been much for redemption anyway; on the contrary, they take their sinning seriously. Roar admires them for it, from the cage of their guilt.
“Good man,” says Iris’ voice, tin-can-sounding through the car speaker. “Once you’ve done that, the worst is behind you.”
Back in their room, Roar writes down fourteen possible texts that would serve to notify someone of the facts of the situation. They find all of them appalling, but choose the least and type it bravely into the text box of the app–they’d never exchanged phone numbers. A photo of K smoulders at them from a small circle at the top of the screen while they tap away. It’s not even a big deal. They don’t even know each other. All they know about each other is how the other one fucks. Apparently that’s plenty.
Roar procrastinates sending the text by scrolling through the profile. They pause on a photo of K in a corset and fishnets, leaning against a lamppost, all camera flash and smoke from the cigarette in their hand. They’re stunning, really. Like a painting Arizona would paint. If they’d met in public Roar wouldn’t have been able to speak to them without shyness. This line of thought spawns a full fantasy of what a romance they could have had, had they been coworkers or met at a bar or a party or any of those in-real-life ways that people meet each other and notice each other and shift closer and closer until they begin to touch. They could have had something beautiful, probably, in some story. Roar still doesn’t know what K stands for.
They send the text. They think about deleting the app, about deleting their whole phone. Imagine if you could just delete things like you delete words, wouldn’t that be something? Or nothing, quickly. They leave the phone to charge while they feed the rats and take a shower and halfheartedly practice their practice of feeling not thinking.
When they check their phone again, K’s profile has disappeared.
“Sounds about right,” says Arizona, when Roar comes over for a debrief. “How’s the itch?”
“Itchy,” says Roar. “I can’t believe they just ghosted.”
“I mean, what did you want them to say?” Iris says. “Are you telling me you gave me fucking gonorrhea, or, oh yeah my bad? Those seem like the other options.”
It’s objectively true, but lands sour in Roar’s stomach. It’s true–better to just forget it, take the pills and wait for the itch to cease. They’ve done their duty. They don’t owe anyone anything now. Sure as hell, K doesn’t owe them anything either. So how to reckon with the fact that Roar feels slighted, good enough for exchanging bodily fluids but not for even one single word of response? A shared microbiome feels like a real connection, at a level below logic. They can’t explain that because it’s stupid, so they just nod.
A family walks past the porch, two parents and two kids. The youngest child is fascinated by something growing in a sidewalk crack. The mother hurries her along. Roar thinks about how they would like to live in a sidewalk crack—how respectable, to occupy the margins, to keep living anyway. Maybe they are doing that already. Maybe everything alive is.
“I have to go home,” says Roar. “I have to feed the rats.”
When Roar returns to their room, the cage is full of agitation. Something is awfully wrong behind the bars. In the substrate on the floor of the cage, Tofu is curled on her side, twitching in a disturbing organic way. Constantine whirls around her in horror. Rats can’t call the doctor or the psychiatrist. Rats just die.
It is very clear to Roar that Tofu is about to die, and the immediacy of this fact overcomes practicality; they throw open the cage door and gather the little convulsing body into their hands with the idea that there is still time for one final moment of connection, one more instance of looking at each other and being creatures seeing each other before one of them moves on to a new kind of being. And so there is a kind of hope in their reaching out, but it’s all projection, that dangerous beast—the rat is dying, of course, can barely see or think anything, and in this state of vulnerability Roar’s hand is no comfort, rather the hand is a predator on the move, a snake or a weasel, something long and swallowing forever, and with the last of her strength the rat sinks her teeth into Roar’s pointer finger. And she doesn’t unsink them, not even when Roar howls in pain and retracts their hand and shakes it around, even then the rat is still biting and biting and Roar can feel the teeth meeting somewhere in the center of their finger and it’s an entirely new sensation, they’ve been pierced accidentally by the world, fuck their fear of permeation, it’s happening, now and always, there’s a whole other entity attached to their body and they’re bleeding and the blood is on their shirt and on the floor and all over the rat’s dying unflinching mouth and then there’s another shake, harder this time, no consideration for the rat as the panic ensues, only the finger and what will become of it—can you die from rat bites? Isn’t that where the Bubonic Plague came from?—and another yell—a roar even—and then they’re loose from each other again, two separate creatures, still death between them, and Roar feels it and is worried it might be coming for both of them, somehow, perhaps the dying has been passed along, or even not the dying but the rat’s actual biology, they’ve read enough to know bites are a proven method of contracting beasthood—think werewolves, vampires, et cetera—perhaps their cells are turning rodent already—so they place Tofu back in the cage to die because what else are they supposed to do, and they call the emergency vet line to ask “Why is my rat having a seizure, and also will I die from a rat bite?” and the bored-sounding voice on the other end says, “That’s because she’s dying, sorry about that, you’ll be fine, wash it with hot water, use antibiotic ointment,” and there’s really nothing more to be said about it, so Roar runs their hand under the scalding tap in the bathroom and the water used to be an ocean and a lake and a river and the water has seen plenty of blood already and is unfazed by the pink swirling of the white porcelain sink, and when they return to the cage Tofu has stopped moving and it is something close to over.
Roar digs a hole underneath the crepe myrtle trees on the street outside. They think about how it’s probably illegal to bury a pet on city property, but the apartment has no yard, and the illegality makes the hole more fun to dig, takes their mind off the throbbing of their finger. It’s a deep puncture in two places. It’ll scar, no doubt. Something about that is appropriate. The rats have impacted Roar’s mind too much to not become a physical permanence, even postmortem.
Constantine quivers in Roar’s sweatshirt pocket as they dig. Roar wants to make sure she knows exactly what has happened, to ease the grieving process. When Roar lowers Tofu’s small body into the ground, she holds Constantine over the hole. See? There she is. That’s where she’s going. Together they watch the dirt fall like a natural disaster, like a story in which the earth asserts its personhood and screws up the whole narrative arc with its insistent existence. You’ve known me forever, the earth says. It’s about time we get reacquainted.
Flowers are drifting down from the crepe myrtle trees, uncanny magenta snow. No movement has ever felt so worth watching. Roar sits on the apartment steps with Constantine curled between their knees. Their knees, their legs, their abdomen brimming with its bloody machinery. Their itching and their scars. Their semipermeable skin. Roar holds the little trembling animal in their hands, and breathes, and breathes, and breathes.
author pic here
Esmé Kaplan-Kinsey is a California transplant living in Munich, Germany, where they are a Visiting Scholar at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. In their writing, they explore human-nature relation and deconstruct binaries that cast humankind in opposition to the natural world. Their work appears in publications such as Split Lip, SmokeLong Quarterly, and the Cincinnati Review.
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