There is an alley that cuts through the block over East Pike Street, between Harvard and Broadway Av. Just two blocks east there is a sidewalk on which some city planner thought there should be a tree and a rock, once every ten paces. Every tree and rock paired together on a island of dirt within a sea of concrete.
One winter day, in a dumpster in that alley, surrounded by bar trash, spent heroin needles and the cold wide world, a baby rat first opened its eyes. A rainy winter day, not long after, not long enough at all, a baby rat went to sleep, for the last time, next to a tree and a rock, on a patch of dirt.
Is it more tempting to think about what the baby rat experienced on the short time it spent here among us? Or about what the baby rat would have lived through had a dispassionate world not neglected and so cruelly betrayed its most vulnerable? What it would have accomplished? How happy it could’ve been?
You see, the baby rat anxiously scavenged the dumpsters for food. Baby rats have tiny hearts and those must always beat anxiously. The baby rat did not want for acknowledgement, kinship, success, or even love. Baby rat hearts are far too tiny for any of that. No, the baby rat’s happiness, if it can even be called that, came at times where an ever-returning pursuit to pacify its bare necessities ceased for a moment.
There must have been satiety when it could drink from the small puddles that would form between the street and the sidewalk after a thirty minute 4 PM drizzle that would, some ten blocks away, cause some city bus to be delayed, and some hard-working parent would be late picking their kid up from soccer practice, again.
There must have been joy when it bit into a two day old piece of hotdog some drunk college kid dropped on their way between the bars and the after party, where they hoped they’d finally meet someone they liked who liked them back, but they’d just awkwardly hold a drink in their hand on some corner the entire night, go home alone and beat themselves up because they were too sad to even cry.
There must have been warmth when it slept sharing a wet, torn blanket with a homeless person who stopped half a milligram away from an overdose because the world is big and the pain it brings is even bigger, and when you live on the open streets the house you live in is so big the loneliness is ever bigger, and when there is nothing anyone is willing to do to save you, you have to find ways to make it all smaller. And your heart is not small like a baby rat’s so it can beat slower and louder and it does want for acknowledgement, kinship, success, and love and it pains and longs and just can’t understand why it can’t have any of it.
One day it was too cold and the baby rat found a place to sleep. Next to a rock, next to a tree, in a patch of dirt within an ocean of concrete so the rock, and the tree and the rat and the dirt, and the concrete, would not sleep alone. The baby rat was innocent and it deserved to have all of these things to protect it. It deserved to have them show it why something many, many years before any of this came to be moved the way it had to move so the baby rat would eventually take its first breath.
It rained too hard that night. The rat that would’ve woken up unalone and protected instead remained asleep, this time forever, embraced by the water that was supposed to quench its thirst and instead did what water does and drowned its lungs because it could. It could because there was space in them and water will not be denied its space. The baby rat was hurt by the city that was entrusted with its protection, the city which had provided for it puddles to drink from, dropped pieces of hot dog to nibble on, and wet torn blankets to sleep under. The baby rat never had a chance.
The next day my dog found a peacefully resting rat, not a month old, who lived a life spanning two city blocks, lying in a puddle. He tried to say hello. I said, “No buddy, let’s let the baby rat have its rest. She earned it.” And earned it I’m sure she did. She deserved better. Much, much better from this world. My dog and I will keep its vigil while we can, as long as our world does not grow too big and it makes us forget.
One must wonder what a baby rat undrowned, unhurt and unencumbered by the senseless insensibility of the world that birthed it might have done had it been allowed to wake up and scavenge once more. And the day after that, and the day after that.
I guess we’ll never know, and that breaks my heart.
I am going to sleep now, on a bed raised some eight stories, away from the tree, the rock, the patch of dirt, the concrete and the puddles. Tomorrow, once more, I scavenge. And the day after that, and the day after that.
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