Кейт Эллиот - The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021

“She didn’t leave a new address,” the woman says. Then she dashes back into the apartment and returns with a broom. She pounds it on the tile floor and I realize that the rat has been sitting in the middle of the hallway, behind me. It darts around the corner and out of sight, but I know it hasn’t gone far.

“Fucking rats,” the woman says, breathless with anger. “They’re everywhere.”

When I find the rat lingering in the hall outside my apartment the following day, I race past it to buy three packs of rat poison from the deli downstairs. After racing past it again, I mix the poison with mac and cheese. I put this on a plate and set the plate on the floor outside my apartment, where it sits untouched for three days.

It begins to dawn on me that I will not outrun this rat. I google “immortal new york city rat” and get no results. I call an exterminator and they say they’ll come next week. I call next week and they say they’ll come next week.

I begin to pray that someone else—​or something else—​will kill the rat. In my prayers, a car flattens the rat. In my prayers, some deadly disease vanquishes the rat. In my prayers, a giant cat descends from above with lethal claws and slaughters the rat.

One night, I drink an entire bottle of wine alone and decide to take care of the problem myself. I unsheathe the large chef’s knife from my Kutco kit, pull on a pair of galoshes over my pajama pants, and stalk out into the hallway, bleary-eyed and homicidal.

The rat is there, waiting, and before I can think myself out of it, I raise the knife, close my eyes, and bring the blade down with both arms. The blade passes through something thin and firm, and then connects with the tiled floor. I open my eyes as the rat lets out a keening shriek. It blurs off down the hallway, leaving a thin trail of blood and a tiny piece of its tail behind, no longer than a fingernail.

It is all I can do to throw the knife into the sink, double-lock the doors, and cower in the bathtub for the rest of the night.

The next morning, I don’t see the rat outside my apartment door and I don’t see it outside my window. I’m too hungover to be elated. Instead, I pull on a pair of jeans and my yellow blazer. I trudge from apartment to apartment, extolling the wonders of the new Kutco steak knives and showcasing the scissors, which can cut straight through a penny.

On the commutes, I google “new york rat life span” (one year). I google “diseases new york rats carry” (all of them). I google “will cutting off a piece of a rat’s tail kill it” (no). I blanch at the thought of the knife that’s still sitting in the sink, inked in the rat’s blood. I google “disinfectant.” I google “sterilizing cleaners.”

I get home and the rat is waiting inside my house, in the kitchen.

My rat and I look at each other. She is wary and still, as if she is afraid of startling me.

How old is she? She is either an old rat or an extraordinarily war-battered one, with three blooms of mottled skin where her fur no longer grows. The length of my forearm, she must weigh a pound, at least. Her four-fingered paws remind me of human hands. Her front left one is mangled, probably injured in a trap—​how she must have fought to free herself. The missing chunk of an ear. The tail, its tip scab-dark, dry, and already healing. She looks up at me, her dark eyes and quivering pink nose track my every breath. I imagine her teeth, sharp and vicious, though I don’t see them.

I walk with halting steps toward the kitchen sink. With a shaking hand, I take hold of the knife. I raise it, knowing somehow that this time she will let me bring it down on her body, she will not run or bite me with those jagged teeth. This time, I won’t close my eyes as I scythe through her.

The rat watches me.

I take a deep breath. I will kill this rat and put her in the garbage, where she belongs. I will piece my life back together. I will move on. I will move on. I will move on.

Instead, I lay the knife down on the table.

I lean against the wall and let myself slide down to the floor. I trace a finger over the scar on my wrist, a thin, two-inch line, ruler straight. I hug my knees to my chest.

In my memory, my mother picks me up by the underarms and stands me on her dresser. “My big girl,” she says. She helps me turn toward the mirror and then holds me against her torso until I am stable on my own two feet, which are clad in black patent leather Mary Janes. Her makeup is littered across the dresser around my feet, her jewelry spread across small, shallow glass saucers. I hold still, proud that she’s trusting me not to stumble and kick all these beautiful breakable things.

I look up at us in the mirror. We wear matching dresses: hers a white and red floral sundress with thin straps, mine a cotton shift in the same pattern. It’s summer and both our noses are a little red from the sun. She has brushed my damp hair into a neat braid. My lips are the same color as hers, Cherries in the Snow. She has dusted my cheeks with a hint of blush.

“There,” she says in Spanish. She hugs me from behind, and her hair curtains over my shoulder in blow-dried auburn waves. Her smell wraps around me, that mix of rose, honey, and tobacco. She taps my chin with a warm hand and the gold bracelets on her wrist tinkle. “I’ve done it. I’ve left you my face to remember me by.”

On the floor of the kitchen, I let my grief draw closer, let its sour, rotten odor fill my nostrils. I sink my head into my knees and a searing white pain tightens my rib cage: unbearable, necessary, familiar.

As she nears, the rat’s body radiates a strange heat. She presses her full weight against my leg and I straighten it out. Cautiously, she climbs onto my shin, and I feel her claws through the thick denim of my jeans. I let her perch herself on my knee.

I let her stay.

Senaa Ahmad’s short fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Lightspeed, Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. A Clarion 2018 alum, she’s received the generous support of the Octavia Butler Scholarship, the Speculative Literature Foundation, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council. She’s the recipient of the 2019 Sunburst Award for Short Fiction.

■ Many years ago, I had this idea for a metafictional, kind of experimental short story collection. I finally wrote the first few stories at the 2018 Clarion Writers’ Workshop, mostly in a sweaty, unair-conditioned dorm, mostly in a panicked run against time, still trying to figure out how the collection would feel and work.

“Let’s Play Dead” was the first of these stories. I’d been thinking about the ways stories create distance from their readers, ejecting them from the immediacy or emotion of a moment, and where that distance can be useful. For example, how it can dilute or even undercut incidents of violence, so these moments don’t become grueling to read. Sometimes, this “useful” distance can come from humor, or surrealism, or breaking the fourth wall, or a particularly slippery narrator.

Other things that fed this story (a very incomplete list): Italo Calvino’s mind-bending use of anachronism in “The Dinosaurs,” Kate Bernheimer’s essay “Fairy Tale Is Form, Form Is Fairy Tale,” that Millais painting of Ophelia, how cockroaches can survive decapitation but will die eventually of thirst, all the dazzling stories from my fellow writers at the workshop (a couple weeks after this, Mel Kassel would write the perfect, delightful “Crawfather”). I’m wildly grateful to Hasan Altaf at The Paris Review for pulling this story from the slush and for lasering in on things I wanted to improve but didn’t know how.