The Rat Kingdom

There it was. In the dirt. The Rat King. Or rather; the bones of it.

Bones alone are a terrible thing, and Rat Kings almost incomprehensibly awful. But the bones of a Rat King are the worst thing in the world, more horrible for their familiarity than even their deformity.

It wasn’t a very big Rat King, as far as Rat Kings go; I had seen pictures in a biology textbook of two dozen rats fused at the tails. I couldn’t make sense of the picture at first. I thought it was a circle of rats trying to flee from a tangle of snakes. All of the rats looked like they were running away. Their jaws were open, their paws scrambling. They were dead, of course, and apparently fossilized. My stomach turned to look at them, but of course I couldn’t look away. At the time I found gore as transfixing as my older brother found porn. It did not make me happy, but it satisfied something in me, a desire to know the worst of the world instead of being sheltered from it. Childhood is as abhorred by children as it is adored by adults.

My Rat King was smaller, as I said. Six rats, few enough that each of them retained some eyrie whiff of individuality. Even free of flesh, their skulls belied some personality. The one on the left was the scrappiest, the one just right of center the weakest, the fourth the only one I might have wanted as a pet. They had been living, once, and I could tell-- which, obvious though it may sound, was not something I could have said of the other animals I had found dead in the wood that same summer. It was this fact that made their condition alarming. The joining of their tails was messy, the bones broken, then re-grown in cancerous bulges. I touched the head of the fourth rat in apology.

And then Macy was beside me.

“What is it?” She asked.

“A Rat King.”

I think she thought I was making this up as I went along. It certainly sounded made up. The aristocratic ring to it was over the top, nothing from the realm of reality.

Macy poked the Rat King with a stick.

“What happened to them?” She asked.

I didn’t know. And since she probably already thought I was fibbing, I gave her a story instead of a fact.

“They were in love. Not all of them, not exactly, but this one,” I touched the head of the fourth rat. “And this one.” I touched the head of the first rat. “But they lived in a big city, and there were many rats, and they all looked more or less the same. And they were afraid of losing one another, so they tied their tails together so they would never be apart.”

Macy was catching on. She smiled in delight at the game, and prodded the meanest looking rat with her stick. “But this one fell in love with the girl, and when they were sleeping, he tied his tail to their tails as well, and in the morning there was nothing that could be done.”

I nodded. “Exactly.” I was proud of Macy. “And this rat fell in love with the boy rat...”

And so on and so forth, until of the rats were bound by bone to their unrequited loves. For a moment we stood in silence, staring down at the Rat King, marveling at their unexpected passion, their unquenchable sorrow, their unsettling humanity. Finally, in a very small voice, Macy asked, “Then what?”

“Well,” I said. And Macy looked at me in something close to fear. “Then they died.”

“Yes, but how did they die?”

“They couldn’t go on living like that very long, now could they?”

“I guess not.”

She didn’t look satisfied. She also looked sad.

“It’s not so bad, really, Macy,” I said, and I put my arm around her. “At least they all got to be together in the end.”

Macy nodded, solemn. For a moment I thought she was going to let me off the hook at that, but before the relief set in, she said, “You said they lived in a very big city.”

I raised my eyes from the Rat King for the first time. Macy had a point.

There are things that happen only in cities, other things that happen only in sewers, but where we were was anything but urban. It was only trees, to the naked eye, trees and bushes and tunnels of thorns.

It was in that moment that I knew.

“Macy,” I said, and the breathlessness of my voice excited even me.

“What?”

“That must mean we are in a big city.”

At first Macy had no idea what I meant.

I glared at her, impatient. To me it was stunningly obvious that the place we had found was not what it appeared to be, but in fact the feral carnage of a brave metropolis. The Rat King proved it. No matter how implausible it might have been, the Rat King was a certainty that could not be denied. Irrefutable evidence. The courtyard is adjourned. Case closed.

“Do you mean like, in another dimension?” Macy’s voice was hesitant, even skeptical, but there was something yearning beneath it that gave me hope.

“Not exactly,” I said.

“Then what?”

“I don’t know how to explain it.”

Quiet.

“How do we get there?” Macy asked.

“Where?”

“You know,” She said. Her turn to be exasperated. “The Rat Kingdom.”

It took us a while to decide. What we came up with in the end was brilliant, beautiful. There was a poem you had to say to enter the kingdom. Otherwise you were just in the forest. The poem passed you through. There was another poem you had to say to leave. Until you said the exit verse, you were in full sway of the Rat King’s power. I will not tell you what these verses were for two reasons, first because I no longer remember, and second, more compellingly, because you are not allowed in our kingdom.

Another thing. The Rat King wasn’t dead, on the other side. It was lithe and live and adorned with six crowns, each sporting a different gem. Each Rat went by the name of its gem, and had a corresponding power. Ruby was the mistress of love. Emerald gave and took of wealth. Sapphire was the keeper of health. Aquamarine controlled the clouds. Tanzanite was the channeler of chance. And Diamond? Diamond was the dealer of death.

We made the Rat King’s six crowns out of tinfoil, superglue, and pebbles. None of the pebbles were the right color, but that didn’t matter, because the heads we placed the crowns so gingerly on were not even covered in skin, much less fur. When you crossed through to the other side, the pebbles became the gems, and the tinfoil became gold-- so pure it would give beneath your teeth and could be consumed like rich chocolate.

The Rat Kingdom-- when you had not said the entrance verse, at least-- was primarily contained in a dense snarl of untended bushes that had sprung up in the field behind the school in which Macy and I learned to read, perform long division, and kiss boys under the spiral slide. From the outside it looked impenetrable, but Macy and I discovered that the branches had grown in such a way that there were several hollow spaces on the interior, small clearings with green-gold roofs and floors soft with moss. In sum, there were three of these chambers, the first two feeding directly into one another, the third separated by a tunnel as dark and tight as an esophagus. The tunnel was composed of curving, crosshatched branches, but the way it constricted around me as I belly-crawled through felt more like mud, and muscle.

It was in this room at the end of the tunnel, in this last, smallest, most secret chamber, that we placed the Rat King. We did not visit it often, but when we did we always brought an offering. Something small, a flower or a novelty eraser-- but it was enough.

We passed most of our time instead in the first two chambers, where we strung up a hammock made of an old linen tablecloth that I stole from my mother. I picked the linen because of something my mother had told me once that had always stuck with me. She was a seamstress, a very good one, and she knew cloth the way I would much later know mitosis, the way at the time I knew only the forest, and maybe Macy. What she had told me was this: linen had been the cloth that the sailors used for sails, because unlike almost every other fabric in the world, it does not grow weak with water, but actually stronger still.

This was how our hammock lasted through rains, and rains, and rains.

***

One day, years later, Tanzanite took the dice-shaped stone out of his crown, as he was bound to do from time to time. He looked at Ruby and said, “My love, what now?” Ruby shimmied her thighs salaciously, but Tanzanite shook his head. “Not yet,” he said, while Emerald hissed jealously between them.

Tanzanite threw the dice, and it landed with its shiniest side on top. “Ah,” said Tanzanite, as if he had known all along. He turned back to Ruby. “That means it’s your turn, my love.”

Ruby nodded. “But whom shall I afflict?” she asked.

All six tails twitched; all six rats cringed.

Tanzanite returned the dice to his crown.

“Who in this kingdom deserves such a plight?” Ruby asked.

“Certainly not I,” said Diamond. Diamond, of course, was bitter, because as he had been the last rat to join the tangle, there was no one in love with him.

“You’re already in love with Aquamarine, anyway,” said Ruby.

Diamond's eyes flicked greedily towards Aquamarine, who reared as far on her haunches as she could, half in pride and half in rebuke.

It was Emerald who said, “The girl.”

And Sapphire who said, “Which one?”

But it was Ruby-- because it could be no one but Ruby-- who said, “Both of them.” Ruby who nodded. Ruby who cast her spell.

***

Macy won.

Macy won, and what was worse, Macy took him to the Kingdom. My only consolation was that she must not have said the entrance verse, so really she just took him to the bushes. She took him to the bushes and she let him remove her shirt. She said he was startled that she wore no bra. Then she let him remove everything else, until her back was bare against the moss and he was kneeling over her, undoing his jeans with an awkward urgency. She was very young. But by that time age didn’t really apply to Macy. Neither did most things. Even gravity did not apply to Macy. I think at some point after her thirteenth birthday and before mine, I started to think of her as astronaut, and anything she did from that point was explained not by reason, nor even by Tanzanite’s chance, but by the navigation of the stars, and the disorienting spaceship jet lag.

No longer did Macy simply fill in the blanks of the stories I told. It was me scrambling after her now; or perhaps it was me scrambling away from her, a scared rat running from a snarl of snakes. At any rate it wasn’t me fucking boys we were both in love with on this side of the Rat Kingdom; it was Macy.

When Macy told me her eyes were bright from bragging. But then I realized she was going to cry. I should have gone to her then, but I didn’t. It isn’t that I didn’t love her. It’s just that I knew what had happened to the Rat King, and I didn’t want it to happen again. I wasn’t sure if our tails were already tied together; and if they were then I certainly wasn’t sure if it could be undone. But I wasn’t taking any chances. Tanzanite could go fuck himself. This was a matter of will, and of possessing teeth sharper than any rat in the kingdom. I cut myself free. I left us both with bleeding tails, but I didn’t care-- I knew I was getting away with as much as I possibly could of me.

I couldn’t imagine how Macy could have done such a thing with the Rat King, even its tinfoil and bone version, watching. The entire thing made me sick to my stomach. Before this incident, I had continued to visit the Rat Kingdom at least once a week, although mostly by myself now, and with dwindling dedication to our fantasy. Instead I loved the Rat Kingdom at face value, for the mysterious, misplaced jungle that it was. Yet I still said the entrance verse every time, although I did not always remember the exit. After Macy told me about her backstabbing victory, I missed one week, then another, and finally a third.

On the fourth week I could no longer stand it. I needed to be there, to feel that something in the green light still belonged to me, and I to it. It was a dim day, and I could feel Aquamarine debating about what to do with the weather. Should it rain? Or was the haze enough? Even though our old school was only a ten minute walk from my house, by the time I arrived the damp had crept through to my bones, as effortlessly as if I, like the Rat King, were residing in a realm in which I did not have skin.

“By the time I arrived” is perhaps not the best choice of words. In a way, I never arrived. When I got to the spot that the Rat Kingdom was-- had always been as long as I could remember-- it was gone. In its place was an empty plane of naked earth, the dirt still loose from the disturbance, not a single thorn remaining to defend itself.

I could not believe my eyes. In retrospect the strangeness was that the school had never bothered to have the Rat Kingdom removed, or at least tamed a little, in the past, and yet the incomprehensible thing to me was that they finally had, and even more than that that they even could. It had never occurred to me that someone from the ordinary, human world, could destroy an entire kingdom, with just a little manpower, a few machines, several hours work.

But they had. They had taken the trees, the bushes, the long grass, the moss, and the Rat King and even our hammock along with them. I lay in the dirt on my back like a child in the snow about to make an angel, looked up at a sky that I had never seen in that place without the interruption of leaves before, and -- yes-- I cried. I cried until I couldn’t see, and then I cried myself to sleep.

When I woke it was very, very late. The sky was black, but the stars were missing. In their place were six gems, arranged on an invisible circle of crowns. I picked the ruby and the sapphire from the clouds and closed it into my hand, but I left the rest for Macy.

***

Again, Tanzanite rolled. THis time the dice landed dullest side up. A hush fell over the Rat King. All six rats cast their eyes on Diamond, even Diamond himself, who stared down at his claws with a grim detachment. "It is done," he said.

***

Everything is dominos. Nothing can ever go wrong by itself. This was why Macy got pregnant, why stretch marks like white-hot scratches from infected claws sprang up across her belly. She showed me these and this time I did touch her, though not an embrace, just a light, cowardly tap of acknowledgment on the swelling of her stomach before, like the villain I had already proved myself to be, I ran.

This is also, I believe, why she died. Others will tell you that it was because Macy was simply far, far too young to make it through the birth, but to me the line between biology and fate has always seemed as imaginary as the line between the bushes and the Rat Kingdom. But what does it matter, anyway? In the end I would always feel that she died because I took the sapphire from the sky that day, and because I left the diamond shining bright and true and guiding as the north star that should have gleamed in its place.

I wasn't there. But sometimes at night I remember in such harsh, pixilated detail that I might as well have been. The doctor over Macy with a knife, slicing the tail that tied the new thing by its belly-button to the too-young girl who had birthed it.

My daughter, in this life you must cut yourself free, and run, and run, and run. You must wear linen to survive the rains. You must remember not only the entrance verse, but also the exit.

***

This is what really happened. The third rat, Emerald,-- the one who had been in love with Ruby, but not loved by her-- had died of a broken heart. The other rats tried to gnaw him out of them, to shed his heft and rot, but to avail. The weight of him slowed them down. And even if it hadn’t been for that drag, there was the fact that Sapphire, who had been in love with Emerald soon succumbed to the murdering melancholy of being alone. Soon the only two living rats were the ones who had started it all, Ruby and Tanzanite. And in a way they were happy, to be newly alone with their love, but they could not overcome the burden of their dead brethren. Unable to move, they wasted away gazing desperately into one another’s eyes.