Prompt: Fortune
The subway rats in New York City have been observed cannibalizing one another. New Yorkers used to buy food outdoors, and eat it and carry it from place to place on the subway and drop remnants in the trash and on the ground over and over again all day and night. Now, they don’t do that anymore. Not like they used to.
One consequence of The Way Things Are is that the population of subway rats in New York City had declined, somewhat. A fact you could read in a book, later, someday, dryly, and pass over it, if the author didn’t pass over it first and decide not to include it in the book. A throwaway fact, disconnected from the important realities on either side of it and yet somehow also obvious enough to spark no notice or surprise. After people stopped going on the subway, the rats that used to live there declined. A down-trending segment on a population line graph not worth the trouble of illustrating.
And yet folded within the one dimensional un-drawn image is the image of a rat, once muscular and mangy, now with shoulder blades and hip bones pressing out through balding skin, tearing its yellow teeth into the flesh of a fellow rat. The violence of scarcity enacted, like a puppet show of itself, by one rat onto another.
What does it matter to a rat that she is mortal - particularly short-lived, among the kingdom of animals - that her death is foretold by forces more powerful than she is capable of imagining - when she is hungry? Nothing. Her position on the downward slope of the graph is irrelevant. She is illiterate, and the author has neglected to include the graph anyway, and her brief life and inevitable death will be characterized by her tremendous struggle against the hunger that eventually kills her, no matter how senseless and impolite it may be. The decline will not be gentle; the deaths will not be peaceful. It is only in the shadow of temporal distance that they will blur into quiet fact.
