Trigger Warning: The content may not be suitable for children or those with a fragile psyche

The rat that became obese off the rays from my television screen

I had just bought a twenty-inch color TV. I thought it could be a nice idea to waste my life away in two-dimensional colored images. I was sitting on my couch and watching the news. The news was telling me that there was a dog with three legs that an old lady rescued.

“This was the first time he had ever felt love,” said the old lady.

The old lady was obese, had thinning gray hair, and had never had any children of her own.

I went into my kitchen to get a bag of Potato Chips. In the kitchen, I saw a rat. It was pacing along the perimeter of my metallic kitchen sink. It was walking on its hind legs. When it saw me approach, it didn’t scurry away into some hidden hole, it just looked up and stared at me. It had light blue eyes.

I went to my fridge and took out a block of dyed orange cheddar cheese. I cut off a small piece of this cheese and handed it to the rat. The rat took the cheese in its hands. The rat turned the cheese over and over in its hands, as if inspecting the cheese. The rat handed the cheese back to me without eating it.

The rat was incredibly thin, I could see each one of its ribs articulated under taught skin. I found a small bowl, poured some water into it, and put it next to the rat. The rat looked at the bowl, sniffed the water inside of it, then pushed it away without drinking.

I walked out of the kitchen, armed with my bag of Doritos, and sat back on the couch in front of the television. The news was still playing. The news was telling me how a dead Middle Eastern child had washed onto the shores of Madagascar this morning.

“The child was dead and bloated, and his head was face down in the sand, and he was wearing a red and blue striped shirt and had a pair of dirty flip flops on his feet. It is a sad day for the world.”

They certainly seemed very concerned with this dead child with his face buried in the sand off the shores of Madagascar. I wondered how many dead children have washed up on beaches over the many years since children had first started washing up dead on beaches. It must be quite a large number.

I imagined the headline, large black and white letters on the front page of newspapers around the world:

“The nth dead child washed up for the nth time on one of the many shores where babies often wash up dead with their faces turned downward in the sand.”

I looked over to my right, and sitting there, eyes glued to the television, was that scrawny rat with light blue eyes. The rat sat with its arms crossed on top of its lap. It felt nice to have some company for a change.

After a while, I felt hungry and decided to go out to get a hamburger. I left the TV on, so my rat-friend could remain satiated. I went out, had my hamburger, then returned. I must have been gone an hour. The rat was still in the exact same spot, staring at the TV. I sat down with the rat. I could no longer see its ribs. I changed the channel a few times, to a nature channel about the African rhino, to a rerun of a sitcom that aired in the 90’s with a laugh track implanted in its background, to a baseball game, to a documentary about the underpaid pear-pickers of Mexico and their sad life stories, and eventually back to the news. The rat didn’t seem to care which channel I chose, it just kept watching regardless.

Soon I became tired, and decided it was time to go to sleep. I walked to the set and turned it off. The rat began to cry, silent tears, a small stream falling to the floor below. I turned it back on, and the tears stopped. The rat looked so happy watching that TV, I couldn’t bear to turn it off again and see the sadness in his eyes.

When I got up the next morning, and walked up into the other room, the rat was still watching TV. The rat had become morbidly obese. I knew I should turn off the TV, the rat was so fat that he could barely move, but I feared the look in the rat’s eyes if I did; a look of pain and betrayal, reduced and boiled down until it became a viscous syrup that could be bottled in small glass vials.

I walked to a cafe. I had a coffee. I had a sandwich. I had a beer. I had another beer. I walked out of the cafe. I went to a bookstore. I looked at the books. None of the books looked very good. I went to a park. I sat on a bench. I watched the pigeons and crows as they searched for worms and breadcrumbs. I left the park, and the pigeons, and the crows, and went back to my apartment.

Inside a strange sight greeted me. My rat-friend was gone. My TV was gone. Instead, there was a Rat-TV in the same place that my TV used to live. It was the same size as my TV, and it had light-blue eyes. It had a long worm-tail which ran from it and plugged into an outlet in the wall. I took the remote and turned the Rat-TV on. The quality was quite good, much better than my old TV, and it had thirty more channels.

The TV worked, but my friend was dead. I walked out of my apartment and went to an antique shop nearby. I found a man who worked at the store.

“I’m looking for a nice box, a box that is a little bigger than twenty inches by twenty inches,” I said to the man who worked at the store.

“Great, what kind of box are you looking for? We have all kinds of boxes. Ceramic, wooden, Styrofoam, cardboard, all kinds of boxes.”

“I’m looking for a box to bury my friend in,” I told him.

He looked at me strangely.

“What kind of friend can you fit in a twenty inch by twenty-inch box?” he asked me.

“A very good friend,” I told him.

I left the store with a box made from purple heart wood. Scenes of elephants and people working in fields were carved into its sides.

I went to a hardware store. I bought a shovel. I brought the box and the shovel back to my apartment. I placed my dead-rat-TV inside the box. I left my apartment with the box containing my dead-rat-TV and the shovel. I walked to a park that had soft, malleable, soil where city busses passed by every half hour.

I found a nice spot surrounded by towering trees. I dug a hole that was about three feet deep. I placed the box inside of it, covered it with dirt, and packed the dirt down tight.

I marked the burial-place with an oddly shaped stick that I stuck into the ground. I wanted to remember where the spot was so I could bring flowers in the future.

END