The Life of a Rat
By Steph Essin
When I was 8, my brother and I had a pair of pet rats. Mine was strawberry-colored, and had fuzz around the base of her long, pink tail. I named her Peaches. My brother’s was speckled with black and white and was named Oreo. Our rats loved one another, you could tell. They played for hours and snuggled at night. I swear you could see a certain look on Oreo’s face that told us that Peaches was his lady. And you could see it: the way he’d sniff her face and clean her ears with his little rat tongue.
We kept them in the same cage, and they ate out of the same rat-sized bowl. We took turns feeding them, keeping their cage clean and changing their water.
That summer, in order to pass the long stretches of time with nothing to do, my brother and I would take our rats to ride on our shoulders while we walked the streets of our small neighborhood. We liked scaring the neighbor kids with them — they couldn’t believe our parents let us have the rats.
“Don’t you know they cause disease?” sneered one girl from a house down the street, “My mom told me if one bites you, you have to go to the hospital and they amputate you to make sure the infection wont spread.”
“Peaches would never bite me!” I said with a mischievous grin, pushing her towards the girls face, “See?”
She jerked back in disgust. “Ewww!”
Peaches was in on the joke, I was sure. She always found a way to poop on whoever decided to hold her.
When not playing pranks with our rats, my brother and I fought. We had so many unsupervised hours: our single mom worked all day as a teller at a bank, and our dad lived and worked in a different city.
Out of our shared boredom, we would take every opportunity to get on each other’s nerves. My brother would take my things or I would snoop through his drawers. We’d hit and bite and scream at each other and when that got exhausting, we turned to our rats.
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One day quite suddenly Oreo died. He must have been lying there in the cage next to Peaches for hours before we found him — his speckled fur in a stiff mound curled into the corner of his cage. Over the following weeks, Peaches started to become vicious. Her playmate, and possibly lover was gone. She’d snap her teeth or pee in protest when I’d try to hold her. She’d stand for hours it seemed zoning out next to where Oreo used to lay. She soured into an old shrew. Her fur started to fall out and after she bit me once while changing her bedding, I was scared to reach into her cage. I started to wrap a cloth around my hand anytime I would need to clean, and I held her less and less as she became mean.
About a month after Oreo died, I noticed a small lump forming on her left side. I wasn’t sure what it was. It was hard like a pebble and round like a pea. The next time I noticed it, a few days later, it had doubled in size. When I asked my mom about it, she told me that it was a tumor, and that it was very common in rats.
“Rats carry disease sometimes, sweetie. Even if they’re pets,” my mom said.
“How big will the tumor get?” I asked.
She didn’t know. None of us did.
Soon, it grew to the size and shape of a grape. I started to feel guilty. Not only was Peaches depressed since Oreo died, but now she was growing a tumor — and there was nothing I could do about it.
My brother and I fantasized about how we might remove the tumor. My mom had some tooth numbing gel tucked in the back of her medicine cabinet. Maybe if we rubbed it on the tumor we could cut it out with a knife.
“We’d need to make sure everything is sanitized,” my brother said. He showed me how to make the tip of a pocket knife hot with a lighter to kill the germs.
“What would we do about the blood though?” I inquired. My brother shrugged. We had no idea what to do for Peaches. It seemed all we could do was wait.
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The tumor grew to the size of a peach over the next few weeks. It even took on a peach-like appearance down to the fuzzy skin stretched over it. Peaches had grown a peach. Pretty soon she couldn’t have bowel movements anymore. My brother and I would try to assist her by tugging at the turds that stuck halfway out. I would gently hold her on my shoulder while he used a pair of (sanitized) tweezers to tug at the turd until she could relieve herself.
“It’s alright, Peachy sweetie. You’re a good girl,” I’d coo.
I studied my brother’s face while he did the poop procedure — his brow furrowed with concentration so he didn’t hurt her. He was such a different brother than what I was used to. He was kind and gentle and he cared. As we stood there in the garage together next to Peaches’ cage, little turds collecting in a hand-held napkin, I felt my brother and I making a silent pact to be friends.
That night I laid awake in my bed. The crickets outside my window providing the background music to my interior thoughts. I thought about holding the tumor in my palm — examining the white mass. The thin, transparent veins that tangled through it. The pulse of it and the weight. It was wet and sticky in my hand— still warm from Peaches’ body.
While I envisioned the tumor, I could also imagine Peaches running happily through the grass. Her stitches had healed and she was free of the growth that held her down for so long.
I imagined what it would be like inside of the veterinarians office if we ever went. I wondered if the rat doctor could let us take the tumor home. Maybe we could bury it in the backyard, or keep it in a jar, or feed it to the cat.
Peaches ended up dying a few weeks later — tumor intact. My older sister’s then boyfriend found her in the cage — the tumor surely twitching while it absorbed the last bit of nourishment from her feeble body.
We buried her in the backyard wrapped in funny paper, and my brother fashioned a little cross out of some sticks and a piece of rope.
It was the tumor that killed her, I was almost certain. She was still young for a rat. My theory was that the tumor began after Oreo died. Her grief fed it. Once the tumor grew its own blood supply, it was too late. The tumor shot its roots through her ribs, tapping into her heart and began to steal her blood. If only we could have taken it out of her before it had gotten so big — if only we could have traded the poop tweezers for a scalpel and cut her free.
Around her grave we stood — the soil disturbed into a fresh mound. The cross stood tall.
“It’s not too late to cremate her,” my brother said, eyes glinting at me.
“No!” my sister said, pushing my brother back behind me.
I stared at Peaches’ grave and thought of her peach fuzz and her cool nose against my hand. I thought of the way her front teeth peeked out from her lips, and the way she used to sleep on my shoulder swaddled in a washcloth.
Standing there I put my hand over my chest and cried softly. I cried for Peaches’ pain and for my own. I cried for Oreo and the way he loved her.
Under my palm, I could feel something hard right under my nipple — a lump-like mass that was the size of a small grape. It was the start of my own grief tumor! Or maybe…the start of something else. I knew in this moment that something had shifted in me — that the pain of loosing Peaches had caused something to stir. I had the daunting sense that I was growing up.
