City Mouse
CW: minor gore, corpse & death description
Must have been a month or two since I encountered that rat lying unceremoniously at the side of Alley-T.
The body was fresh, largely intact and fluffy; I don't remember if it was disemboweled or had their neck snapped but do recall bits of pink and scarlet from the not overtly gruesome scene. Cause of death was almost certainly fatal blunt trauma and/or crushed injury from some vehicle. Assume no one bothered to move the corpse, given the wholeness of it and how close the deposition of the body is to the building, I'm guessing the culprit was parking at the time. Not sure if it was my fear of appearing weird or my respect for warm bodied corpses, I didn't take pics of the rat back then.
In the following days a black van appeared and parked a foot in front of it, along with many other forgettable cars, concealing the hazard from casual pedestrians' immediate line of sight. Being someone who has a tendency to maneuver and squeeze myself through slightly tight spaces and obstacles just because I could, I deliberately avoided walking on that narrow passage formed between the building and parked cars in Alley-T.
Fast forward a month or two, on a crossroad of District L at night. I was riding on my bike, scanning through the traffic flow ahead and behind, where I noticed at my 10:00 some small skittish silhouette was caught in a series of left-steering automobiles 5 lanes away.
Its movements were hesitant, jerky and wasted, but the wheels on the cars go round and round regardless, the traffic didn't wait nor did my legs halt pedaling. For something/someone who is shoe height, has hyper sensitive hearing and blurry vision, there's no room to breathe and recalibrate through motion paralla under a dozen fast approaching, howling engines and blinding headlights.
The instant the silhouette blends under one of the vehicle's shadows I stopped looking that way. I heard a clear high-pitched squeak followed by a light crunch shortly after, both were easy to miss amid the normalcy of all the distant busy humming machinery if the observer didn't pick up the context. There was no way to verify what I heard wasn't just some plastic bottle being squished, but I think that was the first time I witnessed the making of a mammalian roadkill before my senses.
The next morning I went for a stroll after breakfast, passing through Alley-T while checking for oncoming traffic under the morning smog. Along the way I peeked behind the black van as if remembering something in particular.
There it was quietly drying under the winter sun with a half rotten shrink-wrapped ass and scattered anterior skeletal parts, a husk of its former fluffy state. I'd like to think some sterling must have scavenged the soft tissue of its front when it was still fresh, messing up the bones in the process, but it might just have been the maggots' doing, bones and fur being pushed around by viscous pulsating corpse fluids, like that of those shown in time-lapses of decomposing carcasses.
There was no stench nor any flies left; I took a photo of it.
There's a saying goes, "live by the sword, die by the sword". From a human's point of view the tale of the City Mouse and the Country Mouse was just a tale after all. The rats seemingly didn't have a choice, they just get thrown into wherever dystopia their parents were fucking around in and try to live old enough to pass down their genes.
Me thinks it's the same for most of us. We'd like to be kind to each other and live a fulfilling, simple life if there was a choice. We are, in fact, spoiled by too many choices (or pseudo ones). In order to move on a fast lane and eat good we need to risk all sorts of mechanisms of injury. Opportunities comes with traps and toxicity, luxuries comes with the maintenances and subscriptions and rent. And if someone fails all the criteria of success but seems too content for their own good? You'd feel the entire company collapse their collective resentment onto that individual and banish them as an outcast.
Shame it has to be like this (but no it hasn't). People will conveniently crush each other once you let them believe they are in a state of survival. Time waits for no human nor rat for life is short and resource is scarce. Nevertheless when I saw another one limping across another alleyway under daylight, I stopped the bike and let it pass.