Imogen Marosz

I had brown-tinted sunglasses on. They were fishing glasses left by an excitable flyfisher on the kitchen sink. I had been waiting so long at the bus stop that I’d light up a dart if I smoked. I stood there for a minute, or was it a millennium before the bus came. It smelt like an ashtray frappé.

I sat in the back rows of the bus, looking out the window. I was ignoring the knock off converse shoebox in my lap. 

It squeaked.

The elderly Greek lady across the bus frowned at me from behind her black garb and chunky rosary beads. I smiled apologetically, as if the box contained my rowdy children that I was keeping under control. When she looked away, I peaked below the lid. Two little noses peaked back.

Rats.

The bus stopped by Banana Joe’s and people boarded. Some fella sat next to me, rather than in the last empty seat. He seemed like the type...

‘Hey. Cool box.’

‘Oh, um. Thanks.’

‘Where’d you get it?’

I shifted uneasily from behind the brown sunglasses. ‘Oh, uh, yeah.’

The box squeaked again.

‘What’s that?’ His voice was... The fella reached over and flipped the lid, exposing not two, but a dozen furry little bodies. I slammed the box shut.

The fella’s voice got low, eyes mirroring mine as they shifted between our fellow passengers. ‘Oh, rats. Yeah, no, I get it. I used to have one, it was real smart too, but then it got out. It lived in the kitchen and fucked the other rats like mad. I think we had like six generations of Nibbles chewing through our lentils.’

I was basting in sweat. Probably a good thing, since I couldn’t remember the last time I had a shower, or my name, or where I had gotten the box. When did I pick up the box? Had I always been carrying the box? Was there a point in my existence where this box was not adhered to me? 

‘Yeah, they breed like crazy. You can get like a million descendants in a year and a half from a single breeding pair. I mean, if they don’t get eaten first.’

The fella wouldn’t shut up. Each minute he was talking was like an entire month of hell. The bus stopped by the shitty yeeros place on the corner of a road that I remember throwing up on. More elderly Greek ladies, all in black, pulling their little cloth trolleys behind them, boarded the bus. They stared at me accusingly, their short, thin hair pulled back into the same style with hard, plastic headbands. They were an army that recruited at every stop.

I felt the box move. It lurched forward in my lap, almost slipping out of my sweaty palms. I dared to look down and see the lid straining under the force of hundreds of rats pushing up against the lid of the shoe box, their noses struggling out between the gaps. The sounds of their fearful shrieking as they ate away the corners of the box were barely masked by the rumble of the engine. I could feel pressure in my palms, tiny teeth . . . We came up to the station. I had to get off the bus before they found out about the box.

‘You know you can actually model the population growth of rats using exponentials? It just goes up.’

‘Hey, fella, look, do you want this box?’ I awkwardly shoved the cursed thing into his hands and tried to climb past him, into the throng of waiting commuters, eager to leave the steel cage. He didn’t hold the lid down and the rats burst from the shoe box like a waterfall of custard from a magic pudding. The creatures clung to shirts and jackets and heads, desperate to rise above the mass of their brothers and sisters that continued to pour from the container.

The crowd banged on the back door of the bus and shrieked at the almost powerless driver. The doors shuddered against the mass of so many people trying to escape the knee-deep pit of rats, opening just enough to catch the animals and jam the doors even further. I waded deeper into the throng and still they poured from the box that the fella held, his hands frozen on the cardboard. I reached out to grab it off of him and close the darned lid but was yanked back by the rush of passengers that simply wanted to escape the confines of this windowed hell. The rats rose into a wall between us, a dynamic prison in which my existence would end. I could taste them now.

The pressure behind me was released, and a million rats and I were sucked out onto the footpath by the bus station that advertised the country’s most ethical bank. They poured over me like water at a baptism, cleansing my soul as they slowly ate my flesh and left me with nothing but my skeleton. 

I moved slowly to my feet, watching to see the last of the offspring race around the corner of Australia Street. The elderly Greek ladies held the side of the bus door as they unsteadily disembarked. The tallest one turned back to look at me.

‘Πουτάνα,’ she snarled. I don’t speak Greek. The bus wooshed its doors closed and merged back into traffic. The fella stood next to me, holding the closed shoebox.

‘Hey, yeah, sorry mate, you forgot this.’ I took the box gingerly from him and opened it. Inside were two, very normal, very linear-time rats, and a 14th birthday card for my cousin Keith who lives around the corner.