Stephanie Yorke reads and writes. Recent reading includes Jane Austen’s Emma (“Oh no! Shark is only one syllable,” being one of the best lines she’d read in a while, whether it’s read in context or out of context) and John Newlove’s The Night the Dog Smiled (she loved it, though she couldn’t make herself complete reading “The Perfect Colours of Flowers”). She’s published her poetry, stories, and essays hither and yon. She reads slush for The Fiddlehead.
“This story is a reimagining of Geoffery Chaucer’s ‘The Man of Law’s Tale’ from The Canterbury Tales. In the original version, a woman that we now call Constance gets set adrift in a rowboat on the open sea again and again, sometimes before or after getting married. In my version, women and girl-rats get on planes and boats, but there are no weddings.”
Then THUMP and I was like AHOY!
Okay my time’s kinda tight so ta for now and a hug and a kiss each
xo xo xo xo xo xo xo xo xo xo
and I heard there’s little ones again (WHOOP WHOOP!) so here’s some more
xo xo xo xo xo xo xo xo xo xo xo xo xo xo
I’m not sure how many, hope that’s enough. All my love
There’s one done. Next
I hope this finds you well. I’m writing today to follow up on my previous
At the end of a long flight, I used to feel it all through my body: finally here, thank god, I can get up and stretch, I can go out and see. But each year I get older in my airplane seat, my poor slumped corpus knows what’s next is the luggage carousel and then finding a route into this new city, and I would rather stay aboard the plane. If you notice I remain seated while the other passengers disembark, don’t mistake my unwillingness for patience.
Sidewalk, night. Tomorrow must be their garbage day. There’s the rat I’m sure I’ve seen before, she follows me everywhere, let’s call her Constance. Her fur makes her look old, but maybe she just got some gunk on her. As one does. She’s perched on the rim of the trash can, then she’s face down in the bin, yum yum scuffle, her head hidden from view, tail and asshole shifting like the punctuation of a letter dashed off in a rush. Tense, calm, tense, calm – this letter, see, we’re of two minds about the recipient. Don’t know them well. It’s no stupider to default to trust or distrust. Gotta keep your goodbad yesno all in play.
Like rural folk forever, I came to the city overdressed. Unless you only have the shirt on your back, you turn yourself out, the transparent new arrival: hey, guess who doesn’t know which end is up? Me in my puff sleeve dress, which fit me like a valance fits a popsicle stick. When my sisters (how I miss my sisters!) and I admired the dress together, we did not see it as an improvement worked upon meagre furnishings. Oh they said, that is so nice on you, oh look at you, the sewing lady even got the flowers together. The sweetly hunched packrat seamstress had indeed done her best to get the pattern matched at the seams.
A few weeks into my new life, I passed another rat dressed almost identically, except there was a difference I could feel. The other rat was wearing “puffed sleeves” “summer sandals” “fuschia lipstick” rather than puffed sleeves, summer sandals and purply-pink lipstick. I began to consider this difference – what is it that separates me from her? In this place of competing food smells, such considerations never last long.
I wouldn’t singe that with this ember. Yeah that’s the way to say it, not bad eh? Sleeve rolled up as he skins another anchovy. I wouldn’t singe. He sets his anchovy-cutlass down on his workbench (a bulk tin for Fisherman’s Friend cough drops) and wraps the anchovy skin twice around his forepaw. He needs to get a secure grip to tear away that last fatty bit that holds the fish skin at the tail.
Anchovy. Schools of tiny fish just as saline as the water that surrounds them. Ask any diner how anchovy tastes, and the answer will come back, anchovies taste salty. Yet you can’t just replace them with salt, can ya? Strange thing. Guess it keeps your galley rats gainfully employed.
A galley rat like me shouldn’t singe a country ratlet like that – he remembered her perched in her seat, avidly taking in her surroundings – you gotta draw the line somewhere, old crust like me. They had produced two litters of pups together during their time belowdecks – between rats such things are inconsequential – but they were not otherwise. No. As he works he dreams of the night that never was. The carnation petal he would have got for his dresser, the record waiting beside the turntable – he and she arriving at his door with their empty oyster shells, she struggling to balance a stack of three, look, oh how sweet, it takes all her concentration to manoeuvre three half-shells through the door – he balances five and he’s laughing. They’d share the eight shells evenly between the two of them and gnaw the hinge-meat all night.
Constance! You’ve crossed the Pacific!
Aw that explains it. I knew there was something funny about that place.
Some time later:
I got on to something good, and the something good I’d got on to put its demands on me. Who knew how long it’d last? I’d found a dumpster with a hole rusted through the bottom, and knew that dumpster might be replaced repaired removed at any time.
I set out for the dumpster most evenings just after dark, at an hour when there were still lots of dogs around, well, it was either more dogs or more other rats already apprised of the buffet (touch wood, if the dumpster was still there and if the hole was still open, let nothing be presumed upon). I’m a welterweight. What does a welterweight need to do? A welterweight does not need to think too much about flyweights and lightweights. A welterweight must think through a larger rat’s thinking through: the large rats can afford to wait for night proper, they can wait till after the dogwalkers have receded because if the large rats arrive at the bin when smaller rats are already dining, negotiations will be quite straightforward.
So at barely-sundown I am out of my den and booking it, finding my way back to the dumpster by the smell of the dogs that pulled against their leashes as they lunged after me yesterday evening, yes, I navigate by the traces of the whiplash hounds plus a commercial dough oven, a public pool, and a Jean Coutu pharmacy. I vary my path a little each night, I switch up my lanes and byways, using the smells to stay on course.
On the return trip, as I approach my own sweet den, I raise my head to meticulously sniff the air in case another rat has taken over my home. I do not have a firm plan for what I will do if I smell another rat, only tentative provisions for contingencies. If you could roll my plan out flat like a blueprint you’d find none of the designs complete or joined together: just dotted lines that never corner the square, and between these indeterminate structures flouncy cloud lines that fail to connect at the ends to make a unified cloud. I like my current den: my current den is one of the things I have half a mind to keep. That has been true of several dens before. Depending how much of who else I smell when I get there, I may not even growl.
Rats are at ease in the womb, each cosy in its uterine horn with the other foetal pups around them. Friends on all sides, and no idea what a decision is.
Mother rat knows how it will be for you. It is not lamaze to apologise and qualify that apology through the pangs of birth. Sorry kiddo, but keep in mind you’re not the first. An unbroken line of forced exits, a lifetime of hasty retreats.
Imagine a school of cold-water fish. Do you see them with that light on their bodies as they turn? The school turns, and the turn catches the light cast by the submarine camera or the photographer in her diving bell as she raises her lantern. So even the deep sea explorer who took the picture that gives me my picture of a school of cold-water fish hasn’t seen those fish in their own light.
Then they’re no different from this smoked mackerel under the ceiling light in my kitchen, mackerel skin the silver-brown of scorched metal. There’s a pinhole where they processed the fish’s eye. I peel the skin away and use the oily flesh to make a sandwich. I have so little regard for my current coworkers that I eat fish as often as I want.
Dropping the skin into the trash, I imagine how my garbage will be for the rat who finds it. I like chewy foods. If I had enormous teeth, would I like chewier foods? Cold smoked mackerel skin, crusty baguette tip.
