Kristin Hersh - Rat Girl

They all look from the drawing to me. Bob says to Golden Eagle, “Aren’t those things poisonous?”

Golden Eagle nods. “I think so. If you eat them.”

“Do they bite?” asks Bob. “Do they got that kinda poison?”

“No, I don’t think they’re aggressive.”

“Not like a piranha.”

“No.”

“Those things’re nasty,” says Bob.

“Yeah,” agrees Golden Eagle.

I wonder if I can sit down yet. I begin lowering myself into my seat when Metamorphosis sticks out a hand and pokes at the blowfish violently and repeatedly. I stand back up. Her shiny red nails strike angrily at the little fish. “It! Makes! Me! Sad!” she says shrilly, punctuating each syllable with a jangly blow to the paper, “that you live in a sea of nothingness, with no immediate goals, no friends and nothing to eat!”

“Do I?” I ask, looking again at my drawing. Maybe there’s an orchard nearby.

Amoeba heartily agrees. “I feel sad, too,” she says, shaking her ponytails from side to side.

Bob and Golden Eagle look sympathetic. Golden Eagle says, “Some people are natural loners.”

Bob nods. “Poison’s like a superpower…”

bright yellow gun

Headlights race past in a spring drizzle. The nausea’s coming back. Nobody told me about third-trimester morning sickness. I don’t even know where I am right now. I can’t make out highway signs through the mist and rain; they’re just green and white blurs. Watching them whiz by makes the nausea worse.

The bus driver and I are the only people on the bus who aren’t asleep. No old ladies to sit with, no goth knitters, but pregnant women are never alone. I’m gonna miss my dancing belly when it’s gone.

The bus driver catches my eye in the rearview mirror. “Where you headed, ma’am?” he asks. I’m ma’am now ’cause of the gut; everybody calls me that. I’m in the grown-up club. “You going home?”

“Nope, leaving home.”

“Going to visit relatives maybe?”

Wow. Do people still “visit relatives”? This guy lives in an old movie, just like Betty. I wish I was an anachronism. I bet it’s nice. “I’m working, actually.”

“So am I!” He laughs. “Would you care for a pretzel, ma’am? I got a whole bag of ’em.” He holds the bag out to me and the bus swerves into the other lane.

I grab the seat in front of me. Ugh, this isn’t helping. “No thank you, sir. I’m not feeling well.”

“Pukey?” he asks, interested.

I laugh. “Don’t worry. I won’t throw up on your bus.”

“It ain’t my bus!”

“Well, just the same. I’d rather not throw up at all.”

“I know a guy,” he says, looking at me in the rearview mirror for emphasis, “I know a guy who never once puked in his whole life.”

“Wow… cool .”

“It’s cool as long as he don’t eat poison or nothing,” he says seriously.

“Yeah, I guess he can’t eat poison.”

“Naw, but my wife ,” he catches my eye again, “all you gotta do to make my wife throw up is say fruitbread to her.”

“Fruitbread?” What the hell is fruitbread?

“You could say, for instance, ‘banana bread’ to her and she would vomit.”

Oh. “Wow.”

“You could also,” he continues, grabbing a pretzel out of the bag and eating it, “you could also say, for example, ‘banana’ and ‘bread’ to her in the same sentence and she would then vomit.”

“Gee… I guess you gotta be careful. She could throw up at the grocery store.”

“That’s right.” He nods. “It happens with all the various fruits,” he says. “And breads.”

The windshield wipers wheeze rhythmically; rain spatters the glass.

Dave and Gil are sitting at the dining room table with crumb-covered plates in front of them when I get in. They both look spent. I take off my damp sweater and put it on the back of a chair, then sit down with them. My wet hair drips onto the table.

Gil smiles kindly. “Had to do some thinking?” I nod. “It’s okay. We laid down some drum tracks. Dave got three songs done… sounds really good.”

I look at Dave, stunned. “You can play without me?”

“Yes,” he says for Gil’s benefit, shaking his head at me. Whoops. Poor Dave.

“Is there anything to eat?” I ask, looking over their shoulders into the kitchen to see if the scary chef is there.

“She went home; we can finally eat,” says Gil. “We were starving.” Dave looks too tired to move. He manages a wan smile. “Look, Kris. I’ll fix you something to eat, but we have to call Ivo. He wanted to know as soon as you got in.”

Shit. I suck and now Ivo knows it. Gil walks over to the phone and takes a piece of paper out of his pocket. He dials two numbers, then checks the paper, then dials two more numbers. It takes forever, giving me plenty of time to get nervous. I run away too much and now I’m in trouble. It’s Ivo’s money I’m wasting. I wonder what the queen sounds like when she’s mad.

Finally, Gil finishes dialing and waits. I can hear the phone ringing—two short rings, silence, then two short rings again. Sounds like Pink Floyd. I bet everything’s just a little different in England, I think. They have phones, but they ring funny; they have tea, but it tastes better. “Hey,” says Gil suddenly into the receiver. “Kris’s right here.” He holds the phone out to me.

I take it and push it under my wet hair. “Hi.”

“Guess what I saw in the park today,” Ivo says through the familiar long-distance static.

“What?”

“This old man, a very old man with a cauliflower ear, was sitting on a park bench, feeding a bunch of pigeons, right? And his cauliflower ear was fucking enormous, never seen bigger. So while I’m walking by, I see one of the pigeons hop up on his knee, yeah? And then a few more hop on his lap; some fly up onto his arms. He’s got like a dozen pigeons on him. And these are filthy London pigeons, mind you.”

“Ew.”

“And he doesn’t notice or he doesn’t care. He just sits there with pigeons all over him.”

“Hmmm.”

“Right. Then they start hopping up on his shoulders and his head like they’re gonna eat him.”

“Aw, crap.”

“Yeah, they’re crapping on him.”

I giggle. “Geez.”

“—and then they start nibbling at his bloody cauliflower ear! And he’s letting ’em! They just keep chewing on his filthy old ear and he keeps throwing bread on the ground, like he doesn’t know they’re there!” God, I love Ivo. “Eventually. The birds. Engulfed. His entire. Body .”

Laughing, I settle into a big, squishy chair next to the phone. “Know what I saw today?”

“What?”

I tell him the story of Golden Eagle, Metamorphosis, Amoeba and Bob. I leave out the Betty heartache and make it sound like my day was hilarious. As he laughs, I start to believe that my day really was hilarious. Then I realize that it was. Ivo is an angel. Possibly misguided, but still. “Do you have the blowfish?” he asks, chuckling.

“It’s in the pocket of my sweater. It’s probably wet.”

“I’d like you to send it to me, please.”

“I don’t see that happening.”

“Do your best,” he says briskly. “Good luck tomorrow. Goodnight, Kris.”

“Bye, Ivo.” As I hang up the phone, I notice that Dave’s gone. Or else he slid under the table; he looked like he was about to. Gil has put a plate of scrambled eggs and toast at my seat. “Oh, Gil, thank you! You didn’t have to do that.”