King of the Sewer Rats
By Cavin Bryce Gonzalez - Mar 1, 2021
The following is an excerpt from A Completely Nonexistent Carnival by Cavin Bryce Gonzalez, available for pre-order here.
Went outside and stood in my front yard.
Waited to hear something.
See something.
Feel anything.
Waited for reality to prove itself.
Gravitated naturally toward the gutter.
Heard sewage down there.
Crouched down, peeked my head inside.
Felt at home for the first time in a long time.
Saw some beady eyes staring back at me.
Heard a squeak.
Smiled.
I made a cake for the rats outside my house.
These rats are very quite respectable.
They have lived here their entire lives.
Today is their birthday, maybe.
I hope they will invite me to dance.
Everything would be better if I were a dancing rat.
Anyways, the cake was vanilla.
Lured thirty ducks and a deer into my house.
Used a couple slices of bread as bait.
Not sure what to do with them.
But this is nice.
You know?
Fun to look at.
Throwing my clothes on top of the closet instead of hanging them.
Picking outfits out from the floor.
Four hours of cartoons later and I’m still hungry.
Comedy is so ten years ago.
Everything is tragedy now.
Sharks only attack for food.
Whales torture seals for hours, kill just for the fun of it.
Dolphins have sex for pleasure.
And two years ago, an orca carried the corpse of her dead calf for seventeen days.
What I mean to say is . . . everybody is taking it one day, one orgasm, one tragedy, at a time.
Just briefly imagined seven snakes shredded by a lawn mower.
This morning I didn’t shower.
Or brush my teeth.
Or put on deodorant.
I am strutting confidently towards oblivion.
Both hands in my pockets.
The air smells like burning corpses and I am Icarus crawling out of the rain towards a piss ridden gas station toilet on hands and knees made of dollar store single ply toilet paper.
On my lunch break I ate a plum.
Wiped my hands off on my jeans.
When I got to the seed, I walked out into a field of grass and buried the seed there in a shallow grave.
Then went and sat at an empty table.
Imagined you sitting across from me for fifteen minutes.
That decaying plum seed will never sprout a tree. Not ever.
I am now King of the Sewer Rats.
And home is a snarling dog chewing my bones to splinters.