CW: Blood/bodily fluids, bodily harm.

I took the rats with me when Ilona kicked me out because I knew she loved them. She’d hold them, caressing their pink tails as she fed them pierogi, their large front teeth scraping against the pads of her fingers. Anton was her favorite, a big black rat that she’d stuff between her breasts and carry around the apartment while reading about microeconomic determinants, pausing occasionally to kiss his twitching nose. Sometimes, she’d pluck a curly red hair from her head and give it to Anton. He made a nest out of them, a big fuzzy thing in the bottom of his cage, attacking Kirill when he came too close.

Never thought I’d be jealous of a rat.

• • • •

In my one-room apartment with its cracked plaster and wrinkled carpet, I sat on my couch and held Anton, trying to feel some of Ilona’s warmth in his little furred body while he gnawed my fingers like sausages, but that was okay. Love hurts.

I thought Anton and I had turned a corner when I crawled into bed one night and found a strand of that long red hair on my old army blanket. It still smelled of her perfume, like salt and sandalwood. I put the end of it in my mouth, sucking on it, catching it between my teeth and tucking it against my cheek. Closing my eyes, I tried to rewind, to undo all the cheating nights, those spent pressed up against Neda instead of Ilona.

There was more hair the next night, and the next. I thought it was Anton’s way of trying to comfort me. We both missed her.

• • • •

Three weeks later, I stood waiting on the bus, my hair dripping, my peacoat wet from the rain, when I saw Ilona and Lev, a guy from my epistemology class, walk into a pub on the East Side. Lev had long, oily hair, skin the color of clabbered milk, and smelled like coffee and pickled beets. He had a fondness for black turtlenecks, and when he spoke you wanted to shove sharpened pencils into your ears, just so you’d never again have to hear him talk about his trocar collection.

I followed them inside and settled at the front next to the coatrack, hiding in the corner behind a trench coat with a stain dried on the front, lumpy and sour. It was a small space, hazy and gray with cigarette smoke, the wood of my table oily beneath my fingers as I traced the knife marks clawed into the table. The waitress moved around the patrons with an efficiency that belied the soft waxiness of her face and the roundness of her shoulders. She called me honey and I cried as I ordered a beer and sat there in my hole, watching Ilona lean forward, her hand on Lev’s arm, laughing. It was her laughter that chased me out, a warm, throaty effusion that always felt like fur against your skin.

I walked home in the rain, wondering when I’d forgotten the sound of her laughter.

• • • •

I started trying to kill the rats because I knew Ilona loved them.

Every morning, I dusted their cheese with warfarin before I left for the university, and each evening I came home, it was gone. But rats are hearty little fuckers, and Anton and Kirill thrived despite the poison.

Then, Kirill found himself a nice piece of tail in the walls and two rats became four, four became eight, eight became sixteen. They burrowed into my couch, squeaking lumps that moved under the green tweed. They watched me from holes in the wall, perching on my kitchen shelves, teetering on my headboard, their pink tails draped down like fleshy tentacles, the same color as Ilona’s fingernail polish. They chewed through my Raconteurs records, leaving trails of vinyl embedded in the wrinkled carpet. They gnawed my shoestrings until they broke, and I fell going down the stairs. At the hospital they x-rayed my head, gave me an antibiotic shot, and asked if I wanted to see a social worker.

• • • •

I tried to catch Anton, but he raced around the apartment, up over the cabinets and across the couch, bounding off the back like he had springs in his feet. He disappeared into the walls, peering at me from holes gnawed into the ceiling, watching me with his black eyes and twitching nose like he smelled my intent on my hands, my desire leaking from my pores.

The rat I did catch looked like Kirill, all grey fur and long, limpid whiskers, but he was missing the notch out of one of his teacup ears, both swiveling like satellites. I held him down on the cracked kitchen counter and aimed the butcher knife at his neck, but Kirill jumped on my back from the opposite cabinet, biting my neck and ears, and I missed, cutting off his tail instead.

I mailed it to Ilona anyway. From the mailbox by the pub, our old apartment as the return address.

• • • •

Everything I ate turned bitter and my gums bled so all I could taste was salt and iron. It hardly mattered. I washed everything down with Night Train, strong enough to obliterate even the strongest taste buds. I developed a rash, flat round spots under my skin. Every time I thought of Ilona, I broke out into a sick sweat.

At work, in the back storeroom, sitting on a crate of prison kitchen tour books, I sat aside my cabbage rolls, something pink and fleshy dangling from the center. I asked my boss if he could see the rat tail in my food. I tried to explain that I had a rat problem, that I thought maybe one had burrowed inside, but he wouldn’t listen and sent me home instead.

• • • •

I went to Lev’s, crawling in through a side window. His house smelled the same as he did, like coffee and pickled beets with an undercurrent of bleach and yeast. I moved through the dark, mostly by feel, pausing in a corner when I thought I heard movement in another room, twitching with it, but it was only a desk fan, its soft oscillating whir drying the rain from my hair.

I went through Lev’s closet, fingering his shirts and suit jackets, rubbing my cheek against the silk of them. On his bathroom sink, I found a bottle of Ilona’s perfume that tasted like rubbing alcohol and ammonia. Curling under the bed, I waited, his pearl-handled trocar in hand, but he didn’t come home, and it got dark, and I got cold. When I left, I took the trocar with me.

• • • •

A piece of paper poked out of the hole in my bedroom wall, strobing light seeping around the edges. I used my trocar and widened the hole. When I peeled back the wall by my bed, I found the inside papered with Infinite Jest, a string of Christmas lights stretched along the floor, and I realized they weren’t chewing up my David Foster Wallace novels, they were reading them.

• • • •

At night, as I try to sleep, I can hear them all around me, scratching behind the sheetrock, their shrill chattering a cresting wave. So, I put myself to bed with Night Train—liquor so strong it’ll melt anything—and hope I’ll sleep till morning. But no train keeps its schedule all the time, and tonight I wake cold, my insides shaky and weak.

It’s still night; the outside floodlights highlight the tenement next door, throwing its concrete walls and straight, blocky lines into high relief. I feel the pressure of tiny feet on my chest, taste something salty and bitter on my tongue. I bat it away, listening to the squeal and thud of the rat hitting the floor. They sound different tonight, their squeaks high and vulgar.

Reaching for the lamp, I knock a bottle off the nightstand and panic when I hear it shatter. The light blooms a sick yellow across the wooden floor and presses against the naked windows. But it’s okay. It was only the empty bottle that shattered; the half-full still sits on the nightstand. I twist the cap off and swish the alcohol around my mouth, trying to rinse away the foul taste wrinkled on my tongue like a rug.

Rats lay across the foot of my bed, and pile along the walls in writhing masses, they slump into corners, legs spread. On the floor, staring up at me, paws clasped in front, is Anton. His tongue darts out, wetting his lip, and he coughs into his fist, a delicate sound, as if he’s embarrassed at having to draw my attention. When he speaks, the click of his rodent teeth is almost louder than his voice.

“The cheese, you dusted it with warfarin, Misha, but instead of killing us, you’ve made us high.”

The rats on the end of my bed start stroking their tails, the fleshy pink ropes sliding through their dainty claws.

“Why are they doing that?”

Anton turns, looking at the rats on the floor before climbing up my blanket and sitting on my stomach. “That, is how we reach the point of ultimate pleasure.”

His whiskers twitch in a way that makes me think he’s going to reach up and stroke one. It’s a bit of a disappointment when he doesn’t. If he had, maybe I could blame this on a childhood of bad cartoons, but it’s probably the Night Train.

“Ultimate pleasure?”

He grins, showing off his big front teeth. “Yes, it’s how we get off.”

I can’t help but look at the writhing mass again, and sure enough, Kirill arches his back with a squeal before sagging against the wall.

I laugh, high, like a rusty hinge, not like me at all, and cover my eyes with my hand.

“Tell them to quit.”

“Why . . . does this disturb you?” He picks up his tail, cradling it, stroking it. “Now . . . just between us . . . I like to think about Annette Funicello—do you know who Annette Funicello is, Misha? So . . . I like to think of Annette Funicello in her mouse ears. She had a rack, not as nice as Ilona’s but . . . uh . . . you fucked that up. Man, what a nest.” He lets go of his tail and makes a cupping motion in front of his chest. “So fucking ripe . . . I just want to . . . to smother.”

“Stop.” I press the heels of my hands into my eyes. “Fucking stop.”

Anton bounces on my belly before running onto my chest, his feet heavy, a thousand pounds of pressure against my lungs.

“Why? We have to watch you jack off with your pitifully short tail.” He grins. “I see you, saving her hair, wrapping it around you. Feels nice, doesn’t it? Imagine being completely surrounded by it.”

He taps my chest with the tip of his tail before sliding it across my neck, a soft, warm-velvet caress.

“Stop.”

“Stop what? It’s nice, isn’t it?” He tickles it under my chin, and I try to swallow the bitterness in the back of my throat.

“Fuck off.” I reach back, aiming to bat him away and he bares his teeth at me and then drops his tail, leaving it limp across my chest.

Anton’s teacup ears twitch as he pats at my breastbone. “Calm down, Misha. Your heart, it beats too hard. You shouldn’t drink so much. You smell sick . . . rancid like a day-old pup left out to die.”

There’s a harsh cramp in my belly, the rush of something wet beneath me and I think that fucking Night Train has me shitting the bed, but the sheets beneath me are stained red, and I realize the alcohol is not the only reason I feel so cold and clammy.

“Relax, Anton.” I gasp, trying to catch my breath, the taste of copper warm against my tongue. I take another drink and grab the trocar from the nightstand.

I started trying to kill the rat because Ilona had loved me.