Queenie walked slowly, hearing a squeak with every step. She tottered down the hallway from the bedroom to the front door, past the pictures; a great collection of pictures of lost friends and family. All dead now, in two dimensions lying flat as they were upon the wall, held unnaturally within wooden rectangles, framed. If only she could see them, still so close six feet down, held unnaturally within wooden rectangles, in three dimensions lying framed beneath the ground. She could not see them, and now she could not see the ground either. Had the ground been eaten by rats? Was there a ground? She wondered.
She walked across the floor. Was there a floor? She reached the door, pushed it open, felt resistance as the door bent, as the top moved outward faster than the bottom. She pushed her way through, almost fell as a sharp pain bit her ankle, tried to push the door closed behind her but felt resistance, left it partly open and turned her attention to the wooden steps.
Were there steps? She did not know anymore, she was confused, but the railing was there, thank God for railings and all things she could grab for balance. She made her way down the steps and looked down the street. No railings. She would have to be careful.
Everywhere the street was covered with fur. Squirming humps of liquid shining fur. Rats crawled everywhere. Over and under each other, there was not enough room for them all so they formed layers. Rats climbed across the backs of rats like lumberjacks walking across floating, rolling logs in a river overflowing its banks. On the sidewalks, the yards, the stairs, the landings, the balconies and, she knew, the floors of the apartments the balconies led into. The other side of the street had picket fences. She would cross over and use fences as railings, thank God for railings. She looked up at the sloping roofs. Rats on the roofs as well.
Queenie had difficulty walking at the best of times, but now the rats had come and covered everything, every flat surface and a matter as simple as crossing the street was fraught with difficulty. Rats squirmed when she stepped on them, twisted within their skins and bit at her ankles. The bites hurt and bled for too long. Perhaps their saliva contained anti-coagulants, like that of mosquitos. Her calves were covered with black scabs. She had on many pairs of socks today as protection, but some of the teeth made it through. Still, the extra layers were an adaptation, and she was proud. This wasn't so bad, she had lived through worse.
The day her mother died. In childbirth, having too many babies, they were laid in rows next to her pale sweating torso, a dozen or more feeble, gasping cylinders of life. Queenie thought they looked like vitamin pills. They were pink, with red splotches. But her mother choked on the afterbirth and the midwife leapt onto the bed, her knees pinning babies to the bloody mattress. The midwife screamed abuse at the choking mother and tried to plunge a gnarled fist into her throat to remove the blockage, and from between the curses Queenie gathered that something like this had happened before.
Afterwards, Queenie and her brother arranged the babies against their mother's still body, all in a row, and over the next few hours they watched as one by one the tiny scraps of life slowed and sputtered and stopped.
She was almost there. She had to leave the line of picket fences to cross the street again and in the middle, she fell. In among the rats, she felt their heat as their firm bodies pressed against her face, and she heard their squeaks and tiny snarls. It was hard, getting up, but she felt the pavement with one hand as she groped for a place to lean her weight, to lever herself from the ground. She groped for a place that would not scurry away and found one; hard, cold pavement, bumpy and rocky like a sip from a shallow stream.
The ground was still there. A wave of relief as she thought of the graveyard, full of loved ones that needed the ground, it was all they had. Her mother, her brother, her playmates, classmates, workmates, neighbours, ex-husbands, ex-lovers. If she could not visit them, why hang on?
She pushed through the door of the sporting goods store. There were people here, the only people she had seen today, and she hoped not everybody had the same idea as her, they would be sold out. But she walked past the counter where they sold the guns and saw so many being sold, as if a gun could solve the problem! She snorted. They sold traps here, and those were going fast as well. What was the point? Trap a rat to feed more rats, was all. She climbed the spiral staircase to the second floor, and thanked God for the cold steel of the railing.
No, walking was the problem. She could live with the rats, if it were not for the annoyance of walking across their backs. Sleeping was a problem too, she admitted to herself, thinking of a bed crawling with sleek, twitching rat fur. Walking and sleeping both, but she would come up with something, some way to keep them off the bed.
She thought again about rats eating rats. There seemed, that way, an endless supply of food, the dead rats nourishing the live ones, so starvation was not the answer, they would just eat each other and their numbers would increase. Was that possible? Something seemed wrong, mathematically, with this idea, but she would think about that later.
Her brother died playing with friends in a snowbank in a parking lot. The plow came along and piled on more snow, the children crowded close to watch and three of the boys fell beneath its wheels, great rubber oxlike things with deep treads, and chains. The driver cried, but the cop on the corner said, there there it happens all the time these damn kids its not your fault. And the little girls she met at school, they would make friends and become inseperable, carry suitcases full of dolls and doll clothes from this house to that house and from that house to this house until, inevitably, the girl would step in front of a car or a truck. And when she grew older her friends in high school discovered new ways to die on the other side of a car; on the inside of the car, as they plunged from elevated highways and stalled on train tracks, or just met each other in oncoming lanes. Or that man who told her he loved her every day at work, who asked her to marry him in the lunch line, but she laughed and treated it like a joke because he was not all there in the head and he stirred a two-story vat of boiling glue for a living. One day the vat cracked and the man was doused with boiling glue, he ran all the way across the plant to the shower room, screaming all the way, and he might have survived if there had been an emergency shower closer by. That was what the safety inspector said.
It seemed like that was all that ever happened, just somebody dying and then somebody else, her whole life just a string of deaths stretching from herself back in time to her birth, but maybe that was just the way it seemed now, now that she was old. But everybody had died, everyone she knew, and new people she met, they died too and she just could not catch up on it all.
She chose the simplest pair of snowshoes, the old-fashioned wooden ones with gummy thongs strung back and forth, and she said no when the salesman asked if she wanted crampons with them; metal spikes like cleats, that strapped underneath. Crampons would help, she knew, when she had to climb stairs, but stairs always had railings, thank God, and she was tired of killing rats, feeling their backs bend and break under her feet, or feeling their skulls splitting under her heels. The snowshoes would distribute her weight. She climbed down the stairs, paid for her purchase and leaned on a catalogue stand in the entrance to strap them on.
Outside, Queenie took a few tentative steps and found that the idea was a good one. It was much easier to keep her balance. Glancing behind her, she saw that the rats survived undamaged after she passed. And there would be no more bites on her ankles.
Again she had adapted. Proud and happy, she turned at the next corner and began to make her way to the graveyard.